[RndTbl] Shaw dropping bounces?

[Adam Thompson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: roundtable-bounces at muug.mb.ca [mailto:roundtable-
> bounces at muug.mb.ca] On Behalf Of John Lange
>
> [...] The business package also comes
> with static IPs and a somewhat better level of support than residential.

I've found residential support to be just barely on the positive side of 
acceptable.  What sort of improvement does business get you?

> As for local hosting, of the six things you list, "control, speed, 
> storage,
> availability, bandwidth, cost" I would agree with you on only one,
> "control".

Some of these only make sense when you consider it from an internal 
perspective where you have bandwidth constraints on your internet uplink. 
If I have a ~100Mb file in a mail folder, I would much rather that be 
stored locally than have to re-download it every time my IMAP client opens 
that folder to re-index it.  Availability and bandwidth - same issue; if 
my internet connection goes down, I'd rather not lose all access to my 
emails (including intra-organizational email capability).

Storage really is about control; if I want granular storage policies, I 
usually can't host mail online.

> For organizations that have a philosophical or legal requirement to
> maintain complete ownership over their systems, then they have no
> choice to host their own mail.

I've been beating the drum about PIPEDA vs. Gmail (i.e. they're 
incompatible) for a while now, but no-one cares.

> But for most of the other things you list, the advantage is with the 
> cloud.
> For example, availability. I'll put Google's up time against any single 
> local
> hosted server any day.

Assuming the server uptime is the dominating factor, not reliability of 
your internet connection.  Otherwise the reverse is true.

> And cost is significantly in the cloud's favor. [...]
Agreed, up to a point.  If I *need* certain features of Microsoft 
Exchange, for example, then hosting email outside can quickly become 
prohibitively expensive.  Unified Messaging comes to mind.

> And getting back to availability, what happens when it dies? By the time
> you source new hardware, rebuild and recover you are looking at a
> significant outage.

Agreed.

> As for storage, most corporate mail servers do not have 7 Gigs of 
> storage
> per user and that is what you get for free just as a starting point with
> Google hosted corporate mail.

True... but I would never put a company on Gmail again because of the way 
they handle spam (no greylisting).

> The switch is completely transparent to the end user. They can continue
> to use the same email client they always have but as a bonus they can
> now use an excellent web-based client as well for checking email
> remotely when they don't have their laptop with them.

I have to disagree here.  I've used the Gmail MAPI provider for Outlook, 
and it isn't quite 100% stable.  Tends to lock up during periods of poor 
internet connectivity, and requires an astonishing amount of bandwidth.

> By the way, I didn't understand your point on spam. Google's spam
> filtering is near perfect. Much better than any of the commercial spam
> filtering products I've seen which makes sense since Google can
> aggregate spam reports from thousands of users to "learn" spam.

I used to receive >10k pieces of spam per day.  Google would tag about 
9900 of them as Spam, along with about 1% of NON-spam emails.  Then they 
provided absolutely no effective way for me to find the non-spam email 
unless I knew a keyword I could search on.  You still can't *sort* in the 
Gmail interface, which means I couldn't quickly select thousands of 
messages at a time for permanent deletion: my spam tended to run heavily 
towards bombing runs where I'd get a few thousand very similar messages 
sent to different addresses, or sent from the same address but with 
different subject lines... just being able to sort would have made the 
situation tolerable.  Using greylisting also would have solved the 
situation.
On top of that, Google's outbound mailservers are problematic when sending 
to servers that use greylisting, because (unless they've changed recently) 
the specific server delivering the mail is nondeterministic - so the 
from,to,IP tuple often never gets duplicated within the greylisting 
timeout period.

-Adam