Listserve and WWW site info on a home PC

[Derek Broughton]

Amedee Van Gasse (Ubuntu) wrote:

> On Tue, June 9, 2009 03:34, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 
>> Most ISPs prohibit servers in their TOS and those that don't, even if
>> they allowed you to send an unrestricted number of emails, you'll find
>> that many of the ISPs of your list subscribers will reject mail
>> originating from IP blocks assigned to home connections. Even getting a
>> "business" connection doesn't help in many cases. For instance, Rogers,
>> the cable ISP in our area, offers both residential and "business"
>> service. Other than double the cost, there is no difference between the
>> latter and the former. Mail originating from Rogers IP addresses are
>> bounced by many other ISPs because they originate from "dial-up"
>> connections.
>>
>> The only reliable way around this is to host your domain with a hosting
>> provider. I'm not telling you this just because I run a hosting provider
>> but because we've helped many people in situations similar to your's
>> before. You're not going to have much satisfaction doing this from home.
> 
> I agree with the previous answer.
> My previous ISP, Telenet, prohibits running servers, and they even block
> every incoming port below 1024. Including ports 80 and 443, the default
> ports for http and https. Outgoing port 25 is also blocked so a customer
> cannot run his own mail server.

I would say "most" ISP's might actually be an overstatement - most users I 
know with cable modems can host a site, but they are subject to throttling 
if they use too much bandwidth, and their TOS explicitly exclude running 
commercial servers.  Also, originating mail from your home site isn't a 
problem, as long as it goes through the ISP's SMTP server - I do tech 
support, and have never had a complaint that email from Rogers customers was 
bounced except in a single case where the user didn't use the Rogers 
smarthost.  However, I generally agree.

I'd add another reason for keeping your mail servers on a hosted site, 
though. My domain's MX is at gmail.  Gmail is catching 4000 spams per day 
for ONE user (me).  My satellite modem throttles me if I download 100MB, and 
that spam seems to average out at about half of my limit!
-- 
derek