Re: [cobalt-users] RE: SMTP 'Ugliness' issue

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dee Dreslough wrote:

> Well, I don't run an ISP or anything, but I've used tons of them. I was only
> recently forced into this RaQ/Cobalt server world when I couldn't find a
> competent ISP willing to handle my 50 gig a month traffic for 2 web sites at
> a price we could handle with our feature list. (All I wanted was
> Perl5...Just Perl5...Why was that so much to ask? ;) ) And no, we're not
> porn sites. We're baseball and fantasy art. ;) (imonkey.com and
> dreslough.com)

What you wanted was Perl5 AND 50 Gig a month.  It's a big AND.

Lots of ISPs (Internet service providers) and IPPs (Internet presence
providers) allow you to have your own CGIs running Perl5.  We certainly
do, and I know of lots of others who do as well; in fact the majority of
the ISPs/IPPs on this list most likely do.

The problem comes when you're asking for 50 gigabytes of transfer at a
price.  Most providers charge quite a bit for it.  We charge $5 per
gigabyte over our base; a site with up to 50 megabytes of space, it's
own cgi-local directory capable of running Perl5 CGIs, and 50 gigabytes
of data transfer would have cost you $245/month.  While I can understand
that may very well be too high for you, consider the price of a T-1, and
that 50 gigabytes of data is roughly 1/10 of a T-1 if the data is spread
out evenly over every minute in the month (which it almost never is).

If you've got your server on your own frame relay, you're probably
paying more; until we discontinued it, the ISP we recently bought paid
$680/month for a frame relay connection with the capacity of 9% of a T-1
(or about 45 gigabytes a month).  If you've got your own server on a DSL
line you've got a connection that may be fast enough to give you the
data transfer you need, but probably won't supply everyone at peak speed
during peak usage times.  If you're colocating you probably pay for a
bandwidth limit, not for a data limit.  Same thing as having your own
line; you're probably not serving everyone at peak speed during peak
usage times.

So you see, you pays your money and you takes your choice <smile>.

> For the last 3 ISPs I've used, they have me get and send my mail from
> mail.<my domain>.com, so I just assumed that was the standard for 'Real
> ISPs'.

Did you have a permanent connection, or were you using a dialup ISP?  If
you were using a dialup ISP, and it wasn't the same as the isp hosting
yourdomain.com, then they were an open relay in that anyone in the world
using (or at least anyone using your dialup provider) could use them to
send mail (perhaps only if they used yourdomain.com as their return
address, but that's pretty easy to spoof).  Most of us whose business is
based on having and keeping connectivity need to be a bit more secure
than that.

> And, I did find it was easier to set up my accounts with that setup -
> I didn't have to think at all and remember what my home SMTP was.

I was talking to someone earlier today about how nice it was in "the
good old days" when we could leave our SMTP servers open for the benefit
of those people who didn't have their own.  But those days are gone
forever.

> I like to
> think about customer issues in terms of my parents. My parents would *need*
> every piece of information for setting up their mail program (SMTP, pop etc)
> on one piece of paper to have a hope of getting their mail set up without a
> dozen calls to me. :)

When your parents first set up their Internet connection they'd use the
settings given them by their dialup ISP, right?

Then when they began hosting, they'd get information from their hosting
ISP (if different) on how to get mail addressed to theirdomain.com,
right?  So all we do (if your parents are hosting with us) is tell them
that to get email from us they leave all their settings alone except
that they set up a new mail account in Outlook Express (your parents are
simplistic enough to be using Outlook Express, since it came with their
computer, right <smile>) to receive mail from pop.yourdomain.com. 
What's complex about that?

> But, you're right. I didn't mean to push any buttons...I just assumed that
> mail.yourdomain.com was the standard these days.  ISPs certainly have a
> right to have a user use a method that doesn't ruin the ISP's security.  I
> guess ISPs just have to balance between that and the cost of customer
> support that has to be done when Joe User calls in saying 'But I don't
> remember what the SMTP server for my local ISP is...!' :)

But by the time they call our support their system is already set up to
send email through their dialup ISP, isn't it?  We've not run into this
as an issue yet.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672
Riverside, CA  92517
voice: (909) 787-8589  *  fax: (909) 782-0205