[Mailman-Users] Desperate to find a place without Mailman message limits

[Sekhar Ramakrishnan]

This is my first post and I apologize if this has been dealt with; I was not able 
to find the right way to search the archives. I also apologize for the length.

I administer half a dozen lists with membership ranging from 100 to 500, the 
number of messages ranging from 1 to 30 a day on each list, but monthly 
bandwidth for all lists together under 4 GB. A small commercial place where 
our domain was hosted recently decided to stop supporting Mailman, partly 
because their version of cPanel didn't include Mailman space in the user's 
quota. 

We found a number of places that offered "unlimited" Mailman lists, chose 
one and moved everything there via a cPanel backup. The move worked 
fine, and all the Mailman archives were intact. A couple of days later, we 
found that some messages were not going through and learned from the 
support people that there was an hourly limit on the number of messages - 
the 250 limit meant that a list with 300 people could not get even a single 
message out, and that if a message went out to a list with 200, there could 
not be another message for an hour. The only solution they offer is for us to 
get a dedicated server, which costs about ten times as much and is far 
beyond what we need by way of bandwidth.

What we found upsetting (besides the policy being unannounced) was that 
other places we contacted all have similar hourly limits, even as they all 
advertise "unlimited" mailing lists.

We are not sure what the reason is for these limits. Is it that the SMTP 
servers cannot tell the difference between Mailman mail and other mail so 
the places are afraid of spammers giving their servers a bad name? Or is it 
that SMTP takes up so much resource that a limit is necessary?

Finally, and this is the main reason for this post, are there commercial 
places that support Mailman with more reasonable limits on the number of 
messages?

Thank you all for any advice.

Sekhar