On Sun, 2010-02-21 at 06:27 +0000, John Levine wrote: > In my experience, they're pretty reasonable. I would talk to them (or > one of their datafeed sales agents) before assuming that they won't > sell you the service you need.
They are indeed. In my day job, a large group of related members of different institutions approached our umbrella networking organisation to speak to Spamhaus for the specific reason that we were concerned that; a) between us we were making millions (if not billions) of queries a day to the mirror servers, and b) collective negotiation would make a service available for all of us for far less than individual orgs paying for their own. We now have a "private" mirror, which is accessible only from within the same AS in which we all sit. The load is therefore not on the Spamhaus servers or public mirrors, and we're collectively paying for the service so the service is supported. Everyone wins. Unfortunately (for this discussion) I don't know how much it cost, but I would assume it wasn't much because the lead time between request and service implementation was pretty short. Personally I think Spamhaus are entirely correct to identify and block, or request payment, from heavy users of their _free_ service. A little like the organisations paying many other members of this list will do for heavy data users in a residential or mobile context, in fact - but that's far too controversial an issue to be conflated with this one (oh dear). Graeme