On Wednesday 07 December 2016, Dominik Hoffmann wrote:

Ever since my ISP, Verizon, quit relaying email messages from addresses not ending in @verizon.net, I have been exploring SMTP alternatives. I haven't come to a conclusion, but I found an interesting list at

https://www.formget.com/smtp-service-providers/

I think Leon has his answer, but if you can live with a strict limit of 1,000 emails per hour a tiny plan at A Small Orange might meet your needs. I have the slightly larger small plan which runs $5 per month and have no problem sending my ISP address emails outbound through them. This had the added benefit of avoiding the Gmail problem of not seeing your own posts to lists during the ~five years my ISP outsourced to Gmail.

Anyone hosting a discusion list should keep in mind that a list with 100 (non digest) members would exceed the limit with just 11 posts in one hour. The list I help with is split in half on two diffrent plans due to hitting this limit years ago. We were prepared to split it into three parts but that never proved necessary.

William

Dominik Hoffmann writes:

P.S.: I have a stinking suspicion that the primary reason for Verizon's is not to combat spam, as stated, but to make it harder for their subscribers to be in a position where switching ISPs is easy, because they already use email addresses not tied to the ISP.

I wouldn't put it past them, but after spending a fair amount of time on both the DMARC.org list and the IETF DMARC working group list, I think that Heinlein's Maxim "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" applies.

To be more sympathetic to the tech staff, I think telco managements vastly underestimated the cost of moving into the Internet provider space while overestimating traffic growth (their original business), and in particular did a very poor job of budgeting for staff. It was surprising to me, but few of the ISP people on those lists seemed to have either the "security mindset" or the "devops mindset". And they're understaffed, barely able to keep up with OS upgrades and integrating new hardware. They don't have resources -- training and "on call" workforce -- to keep up with malwares that morph faster than Biohazard's "T virus".

To me the bottom line is that these days if you want a specific service that works "for you" rather than "to keep the provider comfortable", you need to find somebody who provides that service, and generally you have to pay for it. I'm not current with prices in the States any more, but people are quoting $5/mo -- that's two beers a month here in Japan. To me that would be well worth it (and while I'm currently able to use my employer to connect to the Internet, they're tightening up and centralizing like some of the telco ISPs, so it's a prospect I've actually thought carefully about -- though I haven't shelled out yet. ;-)