Service Changes: RBL messages and overage billing
by George RobertsBeginning May 1, 2008 we will begin counting messages blocked by RBL towards the total number of messages per account for billing purposes. As many of you know, we have not been billing for overages at all, so this will not immediately impact anyone. We are doing this, however, so that you can see total messages eligible for billing starting in May in preparation for us beginning to bill for overages.
Beginning with your July bill (we bill on anniversary, so the date will be relative to your start of service date), we will begin billing for overages. This will be based on your previous month’s message totals. Example: Your renewal date is July 10, 2008. Your overage calculation will be based on service from June 10 - July 9, 2008.
We have always intended on billing for overages. It’s always been on our product/service pages. Unfortunately the billing system we use has not made that easy for us to do from a technical standpoint. We’re moving to a new billing system in the next month or so, however, that will alleviate this problem.
As for the reason behind the policy change on RBL messages, it’s very simple. Our original intent was to not count RBL messages because they do not require as many system resources to reject as content-based spam filtering. While that is true, we’ve been making some decisions regarding our infrastructure lately that require us to change how we do things to make our system more reliable for you.
These changes are the direct result of the pure number of SMTP connections our gateways handle, about 70% of which are blocked by RBL. We have significant capital investments to make in order to make these changes. It is obvious to us now that RBL messages don’t put as light a load on our systems as originally thought.
Additionally, we use the SpamHaus RBL service as our RBL. We’ve stretched the limit of how many connections their free, publicly available feed will allow, and its time for us to purchase a commercial copy of their feed. Again, this serves to remind us that RBL checking does indeed have more of an impact than we imagined.
So what does this mean to you? For many of you, nothing. A large percentage of our customers will not go over their base allotted message count, even with the RBL numbers added in.
We will also be increasing the base allotment for ServerProtect to 750,000 messages per month and DomainProtect to 30,000 messages per month, which will put a number of other customers under the base amount.
For those that go over the base allotment, the fees remain the same as they’ve always been published: $15 for each 250,000 messages over for ServerProtect, $2 for each 10,000 messages over for DomainProtect.
With the increase in the base allotment amount, you’re essentially getting an extra 250,000 (ServerProtect) or 10,000 (DomainProtect) messages free.
We wanted to announce this early so that there is time for comments, questions, concerns and suggestions. Please direct these to support@easyantispam.com.
Thank you for your patronage and we look forward to continuing to serve you.
George A. Roberts IV
President & CEO, Interjuncture Corp.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
We are still in testing mode. So I am unsure how many emails we generate. For the 3 domains in the ServerProtect package that are in use, it appears to be about 1,000/day, suggesting this will NOT have an impact at all on our fees. It is our intention to get the other domains on board (we have been pleased with the service so far). We have about 10 domains on this server and about 100 total users. Our other server, which is not on your system yet, has about 30 domains and about 400 users. I suspect this Server will go over the 750k allocated. However, that is acceptable. I don’t mind the overage charges or the RBL counting toward that number. I already assumed it counted.
Most other spam filter providers charge per email account. In my case, it would cost me $500/month on their plan. With EasyAntiSpam pricing based on volume, my costs at most would be about $100/month. I consider this very fair.
Thanks for increasing the monthly allocation. I think this offsets the fact you will now be including the RBL blocks as well.
All I can say is that I have been very pleased with service. I love the simple reporting. It gives me just the information I need to communicate to the client that 70% or so of your emails are blocked and you never see it.
It would be nice to have additional reporting. I would like to know which users are generating the most emails, for example. In addition, it would be nice to be able to export the “detail by domain” report to Excel, so I could give the client a monthly status report. Or it would be nice to get email reports by week or month that I could forward to the clients respectively.
Keep up the good work. I am ready to shutdown my current spam filter server and just rely on EasyAntiSpam service instead.
Best regards.
Krume Stojanovski
April 6th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
I forgot to mention that we have another 30 or so clients that run Exchange Server as part of SBS Server. For these clients, we plan to use the “DomainProtect” service. While I am unsure of how many emails, we plan on using this service which will allow us to uninstall the Spam Filter Server already installed on each SBS Server, thus reducing the workload on that SBS Server. That alone is a very compelling reason to move spam services to EasyAntiSpam.
In addition, the costs would still be very affordable. Most of our clients have 25 or less users.
Best regards.
Krume Stojanovski
April 7th, 2008 at 3:27 am
While we are extrememely pleased with the reliability of EAS and the great folks behind the scenes, the change in billing practices has me concerned. We are one that will be affected by the inclusion of RBL counting, so I’ll give a for-instance. One of our servers has 127 shared hosting accounts protected by EAS. Those 127 customers (to which we provide EAS free), logged 2,931.717 emails for the period 3/1 - 3/31. If you remove the RBL counts (2,663,080) - we handled 268,637 - well under the quotas for the EAS account. So, for example, EAS costs us $29.99 for that month in March. In June/July, that server cost will skyrocket to $165 (initial charge for 750,000 + 9 blocks of “overages” at $15/block = $135).
While we have no control over what SpamHaus includes in their list, and the fact that when we signed up our servers we were told that RBL’s didn’t count - it’s hard to swallow that 6x increase in price. I don’t have an issue paying for fair usage - the service is phenomenal - but this is a huge cost for hosting companies to absorb. It’s reduced our server loads by eliminating SpamAssassin and RBL checks on the machine, but we can’t (morally) go to our customers now and say “you’ve gotten this service for free till now - but starting in June/July you’re going to need to pay $X for it - and by the way, $X is double the amount you’re paying for annual hosting now”, and we can’t continue to absorb that increased cost ourselves either.
Here’s an example. We host one chuch website on the above mentioned server. Their total disk space is less than 5MB - all static pages, they pay an annual fee of less than what it costs for an entire month (currently) of EAS. Their RBL count for March 08 was 190,752. Their entire mail count for the month (all) - Ham/SpamVirus/RBL/RP/DNS was 197,957. So there’s only 7000 messages that were “normal”
domain.com 1400 4673 8 190752 1091 12 21
I’m sorry to say, this may impact our relationship with EAS. We simply can’t afford to absorb a 6x increase in price because of this change, one that we were told wasn’t counted, based on a list that EAS nor we have any control over. Has there been any consideration to running your own RBL as an alternative? Are there any other options?
April 7th, 2008 at 3:40 am
wow, I guess I should have run that through a spell check first, please pardon my mistakes at 3:30am
April 7th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Joe–spelling nd grammer don’t count when posting to a forum. At least not in my book.
I don’t work for EAS. However, I know how much time this will save me. Fighting spam has been a major pain.
If I understand the math, if you charged an extra $1/month for the service, it appears to me that you would recoup your increase. Am I missing something here?
While I also provide it “free” to our clients, I have to factor in my time to provide the service. I charge the same fee per month to my clients whether they have 2 or 40 users (actually I charge a little bit more for the larger clients). In addition, for me I will be able to “turn off” my current spam filter server, which is a pain to manage–again saving me time. At my current rate, I will make up that extra cost if I can generate one extra billable hour per month. Even if I can’t, I will be saving several hours a month by NOT needing to manage one server. That may free up 10 hours or more. I am NOT kidding about this. There are many hours wasted trying to track down email delivery problems–many times without success (poor reporting). Not to mention having to update, backup, and maintain the current spam filter server.
My wife and kids might be happy about that. Perhaps not. But at least I may be able to get to bed earlier as it is now 1:31am EDT as I write this.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I understand what you’re saying Krume, however we’re modeled as a “budget” hosting company. Many of our customers are paying less than $35/yr - roughly half paying less than $25/yr - adding another $10-$12 per year to that defeats the purpose of budget hosting.
I know, there’s quality and conveniences with EAS, and I fully appreciate that time saved. My point is that we’ve, for the past 6 months, used a system at a given rate per month, and now we’re being told that our costs for some servers will go up 600-800% … that’s a hard nut to swallow now that we’ve successfully setup hundreds of customers on the system. We currently have 27 servers running with EAS - not a small chunk of change when it’s all averaged out. I can’t go to them at this point and say “Look, it works great, we can’t run this other product because of server loads/management time, etc - but now you’ve got to pay us more” … customers will walk away, even some that have been with us 5-8 YEARS and have had no other issues. I can’t blame them. $30 per server (remember, I have 27), the cost of EAS, I can absorb - $135 or more, I can’t - unless I want to oversell my product/services - and I flat our refuse to do that. I haven’t oversold in 9 years, I’m not starting now.
The odd thing is that I’ve expressed my concerns to the EAS team via email, and have not had a response as of yet. Until I do, I have no other choice but to search for a worthy replacement for EAS.
April 8th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I am very disappointed in this. I am a new customer, and just completed my trial. Because it went so well, we decided to start moving more servers to EAS. We host 40 domains per server. From the trial results, it looks like we would average about 600,000 VALID messages a month for those domains. When you add the RBL, it is about 3X that. The new pricing is going to nearly triple out monthly payments. That seems excessive to me, and I would not have made the decision to move our spam filtering external had I known this.
I think this is an excessive increase. EAS is a great service and I thought it was priced fairly. I would pay more than I was, but not 3X more!
It seems to me like there should be a separate pricing rate for RBL spam. For example, you pay some lower price rate per RBL message.
The other thing I worry about is the fact that someone (my competition) could blast mail at me from a blacklisted IP and I would be charged for it all - probably not likely, but possible.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:05 am
Joe,
I understand your point. We charge $20/month to $30/month–even for the 2 users. So the economics are different for us.
I checked many antispam providers; I have NOT been able to find anything less expensive. In fact, many providers charge per mailbox at a rate of $1/month/mailbox. For me that would cost $500/month for my 500 users (40 domains).
I don’t think you should absorb the increase. Rather I would ask your clients to pay an extra $5/month for improved spam filtering. If they don’t, just remove them from EAS. At that point, they will notice a significant increase in spam and perhaps would reconsider.
Remember, EAS indicated to us that SpamHaus is no longer a free service for them. As such, it costs more to provide this service. Like the price of gas, we at times have no choice but to accept it and pass on increased costs to our customers. Our travel costs and hourly rate has gone up as a result of general price increases. If you go to the Supermarket, you will notice the price of bread and other staple products have increased considerably. Recently, the price of one of my favorite breads went up 20 cents the one week and increased again 50 cents the next. It now costs 70 cents more than before. Some of this is due to gas prices and some due to price of grains.
Even if I choose to not purchase this bread, my next choice of bread has also gone up in price for the same reasons.
Again, I understand your point. We do a lot of work for non-profits. I have volunteered for over 22 years on a couple of non-profit boards. I always charge my non-profit clients 30 percent less per hour than my regular for-profit clients. However, I had to increase the prices across the board–both non-profits and for-profits received price increase. And yes, some left us. That is understandable. Most of them have stayed.
Best regards.
Krume
April 14th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I think this is fine, we can’t expect them to do everyting for a cheap cost, there is a say that says u get what u pay for. so they need cash to provide good support and service + uptime.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I have just signed up but I think I will have to reconsider. Seems like a very huge price leap by counting all the RBL emails:
Spamhause only charge: Cost per email user PER YEAR: US$ 0.02 (based on UNLIMITED users) - SEE http://www.spamhaus.org/datafeed/pricecalculator.lasso.
Postini (now owned by Google) only charges $3 per email user for 1 years worth of unlimited protection (SEE http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/compare.html).
How many email address do you guys host? Does Google (Postini) work out cheaper for you?
I would like to hear what other easyantispam clients think about this?
How does easyantispam think they can charge so much more for 2 cents PER YEAR increase in their costs (per email user)?
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:28 am
Of course it’s fine. You can get away from the volume billing by doing it internally. BUT… To do it internally you need bandwidth, infrastructure, expertise, licenses, maintenance subscriptions, etc.. personally.. that’s not what I want to be doing with my time. I provide mail. If they want it filtered, I charge them. I then share that revenue with EAS for managing the filtering for me. If you don’t want to do that, buy a Mailfoundry appliance or a Barracuda.. otherwise, this is completely reasonable and a heck of a lot easier.
I mean no disrespect, but you may need to rethink your business model if you can’t charge them $1 more per client. You can’t include everything free if you have no revenue.. it all has to be covered somewhere.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:32 am
To answer Adam’s questions:
Pricing for Spamhaus is different for antispam providers than for end users and is actually more expensive.
As to the Postini pricing, at $3 per year if you total up the price of a ServerProtect account at $29.95 per month for a year and divide it by 3, you’re only able to get 120 email accounts for the same price, which for most people using our ServerProtect service would come nowhere close to the number they need.
And we’re not charging any more. We haven’t said we’re going to increase our service pricing per month. In fact, we added more mesages to the base allotment per month. What we’re talking about is charging people for overages above the base allotment of messages.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Overages I have no problem with, it’s just the new policy of using spam to count against the overage charges. Around 90% of most of our customers email is spam, so if that other 90% is now counted against us for overage charges, that gets pretty ugly. If you want to count spam against the overage charges, I think there should be a seperate lower cost overage charge for spam, like Michael suggested. The current overage rates could still apply against good email and then there would be a seperate overage charge against spam, but that charge would be much less then the normal overage charge, because everyone gets a lot more spam then they do good email.