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Old 10 Nov 2020, 11:46 AM   #586
jarland
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Join Date: Apr 2014
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Representative of:
MXRoute.com
Hey friends,

I really love this thread because reading it back reveals so many things. It shows insight into the day to day of building out an email service, and it shows my growth as a person (for better or worse, and I've had no shortage of room for improvement as an individual). Because of that, I wanted to continue the trend and share with you guys some more insight into what it's like to run an email provider. Especially one that offers certain "unlimited" values to try to challenge the market:

Sometimes people wonder how you can sell something that can't be utilized at 100% capacity by 100% of customers without kicking people off the boat simply for utilizing it. I have a fun story to that end.

Obviously, if 100% of our customers created 100 email accounts and sent 300 emails per hour (our limit per email account by policy) from every one of them, MXroute would be in crisis mode to keep up. The reality is that to this day, with this exceptional number of customers under my belt, I'm monitoring the top 15 senders every hour of every day and the last email on the list most hours sends 10-15 emails in that hour. The need for sending high volume is easily broken up by our policy of not creating additional email accounts for the sole purpose of bypassing the 300 outbound per hour (per email account), or by intent (don't spam, don't run scams through our service).

Despite the potential of someone legitimate being a consistently top sender that pushes against the 300 outbound per hour limit, anyone meeting that threshold consistently has always created for themselves the events that lead to their termination. It isn't that I want to terminate the top senders, it's that in practice literally no one makes it into that category under our policies for good reason (meaning not "burst" sending but consistent, every hour of every day). You see, I just terminated our top sender since 2016. It took 4 years for someone to report to me what they'd been doing, but our outbound numbers will now be dropping by at least 50%. You won't disagree with my reason for terminating them, and you may find it intriguing:

I found that we've been harboring a huge scam in China that has been going on for years, largely under the radar. If you start searching for it you'll probably find some version of it, and you'll find the reports very disconnected because no one has connected them all together. They're good at making sure that doesn't happen. There are thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of websites selling cheap goods from China with this business plan: No matter what they order, send them a pair of sunglasses and when they complain, offer a 40% refund (and never even provide that). That has been our top sender for 4 years. It turns out, though they never told us why, this is the reason why we've had t-online.de randomly blacklist some of our IPs (they always cleared the blocks on request, never offered insight into why).

I thought you all might like the story.

Last edited by jarland : 10 Nov 2020 at 06:17 PM.
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Old 22 Apr 2022, 03:57 AM   #587
FredOnline
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Virus in PDF file

Taken from MXroute on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/...b1c/?context=3

Quote:
Yesterday I found a wealth of customer email accounts compromised, being used to send spam. It's always caught and shut down fairly quickly, but this time they got a few hours in between all of the compromised accounts before they were caught. After extensive review and working with customers, we were able to determine that a virus is going around in a PDF file which users are receiving, opening, and then the virus sends their email credentials (from their machine, exact method presently unknown) to the attacker. Afterwards the attacker uses their email account to send the virus back out to others.
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Old 22 Apr 2022, 07:07 AM   #588
Bamb0
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Thumbs down

I dont like MXROUTE... In the last few months they wont let me send SMS TO MOBILE...

I send to number@vtext.com or @mms.att.net and I get a bounce back saying "EMAIL to SMS is not allowed on our platform"


I guess they think we are all bad
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Old 22 Apr 2022, 10:52 PM   #589
jarland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bamb0 View Post
I dont like MXROUTE... In the last few months they wont let me send SMS TO MOBILE...

I send to number@vtext.com or @mms.att.net and I get a bounce back saying "EMAIL to SMS is not allowed on our platform"


I guess they think we are all bad
One spam message goes out to AT&T. Here’s the result:

Every single one of our customers cannot send ANY email to ANY user at Yahoo, AT&T, or any of their sub-brands for 2 weeks while I personally negotiate the end of the war.

Same thing with Verizon but worse. I had to negotiate with the CEO’s team for weeks and outsource all email to every brand they even arguably own in the meantime. Why? One customer’s email account was compromised for 15 minutes. Now consider that 5-10 email accounts are compromised every day because users can’t stop reusing bad passwords. I catch them, but you can thank my policy for it not causing you to not be able to send any email to AOL, Yahoo, Verizon, AT&T, etc for 2 weeks after each one.

I made the right call. Text messages are highly regulated and the regulations vary by region. There's a reason Twilio exists and it's not just because people don't know about email to SMS. If I have to trade the 3 customers (out of over 14,000 direct, tons more indirect) who want to use it to keep my business plan intact, definitely the right call. It's not the hill I'll be dying on, the numbers just don't support it and I'm not in the SMS market.

There are reasons that these big companies charge what they do. Refusing to mirror their business model is one of my primary goals. Sometimes that means I have to lose less than 10 customers for a choice that protects thousands or more customers, while protecting my business strategy. Most of those customers came to me specifically because of my business strategy so it's not just about what I want. Trading quite literally one use case for exactly 3 users (I'm actually serious about that figure) due to the excessive cost of dealing with that use case is, frankly, an easy choice to make.

Last edited by jarland : 22 Apr 2022 at 11:44 PM.
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Old 23 Apr 2022, 02:04 AM   #590
digp
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Altho I don't like Mxroute or Jarland's approach he is right on this
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Old 24 Apr 2022, 07:09 AM   #591
Bamb0
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Maybe Mr Jarland will add my email address to a 'OK' list so I can send??

I do not send spam..........

Im sorry Mr Jarland......
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Old 24 Apr 2022, 09:11 AM   #592
jarland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bamb0 View Post
Maybe Mr Jarland will add my email address to a 'OK' list so I can send??

I do not send spam..........

Im sorry Mr Jarland......
In the future making a whitelist for it might actually make sense, good thought. Right now it's not handled in a way that makes that reasonable.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Pushover. You can send messages and alerts to your phone via email or API, it is frankly the most key factor in my monitoring system.
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Old 13 Aug 2022, 02:37 PM   #593
Bamb0
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Red face

YOU ARE ABUSING YOUR AUTHORITY!!!

You cannot delete someones email accounts on thier email server for someone sendng a text message to a mobile with subject "HEY BUDDY"

It was an innocent message I sent to a friend and you affected all my friends emails on that domain FOR NOTHING!!!
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Old 19 Aug 2022, 09:50 AM   #594
jarland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bamb0 View Post
YOU ARE ABUSING YOUR AUTHORITY!!!

You cannot delete someones email accounts on thier email server for someone sendng a text message to a mobile with subject "HEY BUDDY"

It was an innocent message I sent to a friend and you affected all my friends emails on that domain FOR NOTHING!!!
I can absolutely terminate a customer for ignoring abuse complaints and you better get your emotions in check. Clean it up, take about 80% off the top there bud.

Last edited by jarland : 19 Aug 2022 at 10:04 AM.
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Old 19 Aug 2022, 10:26 AM   #595
Bamb0
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Im so sorry.. Sometimes I get carried away
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Old 19 Aug 2022, 10:39 AM   #596
jarland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bamb0 View Post
Im so sorry.. Sometimes I get carried away
Been there. Forgiven, forgotten.
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Old 5 Dec 2022, 07:58 AM   #597
SethM
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Rollernet.us
Just as a general FYI to anyone relying on email-to-text gateways: many (all?) providers are tossing them into the "unsupported" bin with no expectation that they will actually deliver what you submit to them or continue to work in the future. If cell carriers consider them unsupported, using my email provider hat I also consider being able to deliver to them as unsupported.

All carriers have some kind of "enterprise" offering if you really need SMTP to SMS, plus there are options to submit SMS from providers like Twilio. There are also regulatory issues like this: SMS Compliance and A2P 10DLC in the US (twilio link because that's who I use)
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Old 6 Dec 2022, 04:52 AM   #598
jdtaylor
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I had used mxroute years ago for email hosting. I think I’ll have another look shortly.
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Old 6 Dec 2022, 07:22 AM   #599
Bamb0
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I think Mr Jarland is doing a good job..... I feel he is sick of it all and doesnt stand anything that might look like spam....... Its sad people have to worry so much.....

When I sent my message to the mobile IT WASNT SPAM but Mr Jarland was having a spam attack going on at the same time and he reacted to both..........

Its hard running a mail service now.....
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Old 7 Dec 2022, 02:14 AM   #600
jarland
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MXRoute.com
It's been a while since I've given a business update here. Business is good, better than ever. Inflation is trying to squeeze us but increasing prices on existing customers remains the last item on the list to deal with it, I would only consider it before the option of permanently closing the doors. I see no evidence that I'm going to reach the point of having to consider it.

Meanwhile, I'm actually increasing overhead and doing a lot of server migrations. Aged hardware being phased out, moving servers behind our own IP space. It'll pay off in the long game.

We're still not overly profitable but that was always the plan. Profit is overrated, as long as everyone is taken care of (my paycheck is enough but nothing to brag about). The long game continues to involve slowly increasing prices for new customers in addition to slowly decreasing overhead from power, bandwidth, and hardware costs (present economic status not considered permanent). All in all I'd say it's a healthy business and customers are mostly appreciating the consistency of outbound delivery.
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