On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 09:10:08PM -0600, Gordon Fecyk wrote:
I'd like to think said customer needs a clue about who really owns domain
names. But aside from that, the ISP could demonstrate some actual customer
service and take care of this for them.[1] Ie: "Dear customer, please put
'mail.example.com' in your mail program and use these other settings[2] like
our documentation says." The ISP can handle everything else on the back
end.[3]
Surely there is /a/ solution.
But this is mainly a 2822-From vs. 2821-MAIL issue.
Most users (and IMHO quite some browsers) do not really support setting
this explicitely and to different values.
And even if they do e.g. roaming users want to use their business
address and set it in 2822-From. But if they use local ISPs address
in the 2821-MAIL they probably never get anything like errors, as they
will not check their boxes. We have customers that have the mailbox
for 5-6 years and they use it to send email via SMTP AUTH for quite some
time but they do not check their box any longer (which they did "by
"accident" when they used SMTP after POP).
We use SMTP AUTH but we do not change e.g. envelopes, so if a user can
SMTP AUTH as "joe(_at_)example(_dot_)com" he still can use
"jack(_at_)example(_dot_)net" as
an envelope sender.
[1] My understanding is Internet Provider Customer Service is in short
supply. This is a rant I'll leave for another forum.
Win margings in the ISP business are quite small. And giving 2 hours
of telephone support to a customers that pays about 1 USD per month for
DNS service for his domain simply doesn't pay out, but the vast majority
of customers are not willing to pay more.
In Germany we have some major hosters that provide Webspace and domains
for 0.99 EUR per month and that maintain (like they say) more than 1
million domains.
Business customers with leased lines are /not/ the problem. This is from
the last hostcount from RIPE:
CY SOA COUNTED DUPL REAL CHANGE
==============================================================
de 3942843 14609703 12006696 2603007 78711
Background information and more statistics are available at
http://www.ripe.net/hostcount/
The number of "joe-user.de" domains is outnumbering the business domains
by far and most of them simply have their domain because it is as cheap
as 1 EUR/month. Some just know enough about the Internet to connect
and start their preferred chat system (and the configuration was done
by a friend of a friend). Trying to help them set up something like SPF
is simply without any chance.
\Maex
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