Thursday, Debtember 27, 2007
“Damn you to hell, Canter & Siegel”
When we first had problems in late 2004 we were sending out 50,000 member-requested emails a week. Since mail functions are so deeply wired into core server technologies the average web engineer has no ideas how many emails are going out. I sure didn't. But now I do. We're sending about 400,000 member-requested emails a week. We've had to dedicate significant amounts of time (and thus money) to become sendmail geeks, mastering the myriad error codes, loopback systems and contact policies of the large mail providers and scripting many back-end and website functions to stay in compliance as best we can. We've even had to retain a mail delivery analysis partner, and still debate if we'll have to pay a third party to send all out emails. If one of us was already a master of sendmail, and had connections at big mail providers this would be easy, but how many people fit that descirption in the average 10 person start-up?
Sending Email is a Big Headache for Small Companies with Popular Websites
The rest of the article goes into how difficult it is for a business to send out mass volumes of (and in this case, it appears to be very legitimate) email and all the tricks they have to do in order to satisfy their customers (who apparently get some form of notification via email).
And as a company that doesn't use email as our primary service (we're a web-hosting company), we still have to deal with some of this crap as we too, get blacklisted and blocked by larger ISPs.
I'm afraid that soon email will only be handled between large
companies and anything from an “unregistered” server (read: “from a non-large
company that hasn't paid the proper Danegeld jizya
bribes licensing fees”) will be dropped. In the end, if we want
email, we must submit to the Borg use Gmail and that has me worried.
