Hosted Applications

Being a small business owner, I heavily utilize network-based services and applications. So when my DSL connection is down, I'm out of business. Actually, I just get overly caffeinated because I head down to the local coffee ship.

I also use a shared web hosting service. Uptime is OK and it's painful when it's down, but that's maybe an hour a month on average - so it's tolerable. But I'm pretty pragmatic about that because no one is going to lose their job if they can't get to my web site. I certainly have no illusions of dependency here. So I pay my $8/mo and take the downtime with a smile.

But email is a different story. I use a hosted Exchange service because I absolutely cannot live without my Blackberry and like the calendar and contact integration. Truth be told, I haven't tried to live without my Blackberry for about 4 years, so I may not actually die. But I'm not willing to take the risk. The hosted service also lets me sync up my office PC with my MacBook transparently. It works well - pretty much all the time. Except today.

It seems one of the outbound mail servers (of course the one serving me) has found it's way onto the SpamCop blacklist. So basically I'm out of business. I am still getting inbound mail, but I've tried to send about 7 emails over the past 15 minutes and all of them have bounced. About 60% are using Barracuda (which evidently uses SpamCop) and the rest are random gateways. Bottom line is that my mail is rejected out of hand.

There is always collateral damage in any war, and in the war on spammers, the collateral is me.

The worst part is that I have no control. I can't make SpamCop remove the blacklisted IP address. I can't make my hosted email provider change the DNS address. And I can't send outbound email. So sorry if I owe you stuff and I can't get it to you. Hopefully this will be worked out by tonight. Worst case, I'll start sending mail via Yahoo!, but I'm hoping to avoid that.

Now I've got to grin and bear it for a few hours (hopefully) while they work it out. I'm not a big fan of grinning and bearing anything, but I'm not going to deploy my own Exchange server and Blackberry BES, now am I? I'm going to bend over and say "Thank you sir, may I have another!"