Charles Sprickman wrote:
That’s unrealistic. Many ISPs these days that aren’t the “big boys” with dedicated staff for every facet of ISP operations, they are one and two man shops running WISPs in rural areas or developing countries. It’s not the 90’s anymore. It’s a terrible default, even home users should have to take an effort to enable a commercial service.
I'm baffled by how a "one or two man shop [W]ISP" can have an in-house email system that generates more queries than the free limits unless you're outsourcing nearly everything else including DNS caching. (At which point, why are you not outsourcing your mail service and spam filtering too?) From personal experience, a provider of that size likely has less than 1000 customers, which should match to mail flow well under the free limit.
I started work for one such small ISP in 2001 with ~2600 users at peak (granted, the spam landscape was quite different then), and when that company got taken over by a larger company in 2003, moved on to maintaining the spam filtering for that larger company.
In that position we still weren't crossing the free query limits for a while, at ~40K users. None of the five or six other small mail systems I've had some hand in integrating have come close to the free limits, and several of those providers have had ~10-15 full-time staff. All of them *have* had local caching, even if it was built into some nightmare black-box mail appliance horror, or Microsoft's DNS cache from Windows Server 2003 (or possibly older, only got involved in the fringes of that one).
It's not impossible, I'll grant (one guy I knew of a year or two ahead in university was - in 1997 or so - getting IIRC more than ~5K spams daily, personally), but I'd call it extremely rare even today.
-kgd
