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

[Ivan Van Laningham]

Hi All--
I run ten to eleven mailing lists, with, just as you have, 100-500 
members apiece.  I have a dedicated server with Godaddy.  They told me 
that yes, I could run mailing lists.  They didn't tell me in advance 
that there was a daily limit of 1000 outgoing messages per day.  I 
discovered that as soon as the first mailing list went into operation 
and I had to wait 24 hours for the counter to be reset.

In order to raise the limit to something reasonable, I had to provide 
documentation to Godaddy through some automated tools they have.  I 
think in the end it amounted to about 20 pages of justification.  It was 
definitely a pain, because their base assumption is that mailing lists 
are newsletters sent to customers.  It follows that if you are a 
capitalist with customers, you lust to become an evil spammer, and only 
the fear of legal action and forcible disconnection keeps you from 
inundating the net with enlargement ads.

You have to provide samples of your "newsletters," which is a bit 
difficult if you want to provide a modicum of privacy for your subscribers.

I made calculations based on the size of the lists and the number of 
subscribers and requested my limit be raised to that limit.  Godaddy cut 
that request to 1/3, which irritated me a lot, but all the messages went 
through without a hitch.  Later, I realized that my calculations were 
off because I didn't remember that mailman will batch the transmissions 
so that I had far fewer outgoing emails than I thought.  This would be 
different if I turned on full personalization, but I don't have any need 
for that.

All in all, the Godaddy experience has been positive.  I lease a far 
better machine than the prior one that I owned, and pay far less than I 
did when I colocated my server at a local ISP (you can get _substantial_ 
discounts by paying in full for two to five years in advance: _ask_).  I 
get more bandwidth, and the automated tools are, I reluctantly admit, 
not bad at all (Plesk; it's worth the monthly fee, just don't access it 
with IE.  Use only Firefox).

The cons are that Godaddy's service when you call to talk to a tech is 
not the best.  Mostly, it consists of asking, "Did you read the FAQ on 
xxx?", stating "There is nothing wrong with our mail system," or saying, 
"I'm sorry, we don't support that software, since we don't force you to 
use it."  (This last despite the fact that the software in question is 
the only software supplied on the system, and so you are forced to use 
it by default.  They say you can install whatever you want on your 
system.)  You'll end up googling a lot.  You learn quickly, however. ;-)

If you don't have the need for a dedicated server, you could go with a 
dedicated virtual server, which is a great deal cheaper, but you don't 
get things like three dedicated IP addresses and you have to share the 
machine (it looks like your own machine, however, because you're in a 
chroot box).

They also have hosting plans that might include mailing lists, but I 
never really considered those.

Hope this helps.

Metta,
Ivan

Sekhar Ramakrishnan wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 

-- 
Ivan Van Laningham
God N Locomotive Works
http://www.pauahtun.org/
http://www.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings/papers/laningham/laningham.html
Army Signal Corps:  Cu Chi, Class of '70
Author:  Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours