So You Think You Want to Offer Email to Your Customers

I’ve heard this time and time again. However, please be aware that offering email to your clients will be the single largest generator of support calls that you will have (assuming the products you sell them aren’t complete crap).

I can’t stress this enough: Managing an email server with non-trusted users can be a real nightmare. One of my customers runs their own mail server, and one of their customers just sent a little email to “some” of their customers. Expressed in C# it would go a little something like this:

int some = 2684;

Yeah, they spammed 2,684 people. Of course a large percentage of those addresses were either non-existent, greylisted, full mailboxes, or any number of other things that would cause retransmits, thus causing the SMTP process to spiral out of control. The queue backed up and viola, email stopped moving.

The next logical evolution of this little gem is if some of those 2,684 people report this piece of spam to the RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists). Since RBLs work off of IP addresses and all of my customer’s customers use the same IP, they could soon face the problem of having hundreds of paying customers unable to send email to just about everyone on the Internet.

Ah, the joys of serving mail to your customers. Just say no. If you can’t say no, remember to say “pay up”.