When dreams become nightmares
May 31, 2007 – 9:29 pmI’ve run into a strange problem with my mail and web service provider, Dreamhost.
Every so often I send a mail about events that I’m producing. On each occasion I go through the my contact database and select the people and groups I think would be interested in attending. I try not to send information to people whom I think would not be interested and I use emailmerge software to personalise the invites.
Yesterday I tried to send out an invitation to the Crossover UK launch at InSync on June 20th. After a little while I got a message that I had exceeded my ‘send quota’. It took a little while to work out that Dreamhost (strapline: ‘we host your dreams’) had, without telling me, imposed a cap on all accounts of a maximum of 100 messages per hour. This is in an entirely laudable attempt to prevent spam.
Apparently, they will remove this limit if I can demonstrate that all the people I’m sending mail to have actively opted in to being on my ‘announcement list’. I would then be able to use a web form to send to a list of addresses held on a Dreamhost server.
Since I never send to the same set of email addresses twice, each mail would be seen as going to a different list; I’d have to send a message to all the people I wanted to invite asking them whether they wanted to receive an invitation from me before I could invite them.
All attempts to reason with Dreamhost have met with an obdurate insistence that I comply with their policy, even though (as they acknowledge) it forces me to offer a less personalised service. I hadn’t realised when I signed up for Dreamhost that I’d be entering a world of Alice in Wonderland nightmare logic.
Can anyone suggest an alternative service provider?
One Response to “When dreams become nightmares”
In the same boat. After moving all of the sites I manage as well as a friends sites to DH I finally took the plunge and moved the sites of the company I work for over. We are now running into this quota issue and I have yet to find a notification of the quota anywhere on the site. Didn’t know it existed until I violated it. Not really an acceptable thing. I had to stay at work until midnight the other night getting notifications of a new TV special out to our readers. Ridiculous if you ask me. I’ve finally stopped asking the support people and merely ask them to either forward my email on to somebody who can actually make a decision using a bit more than a rigid if/then statment, or provide me with a mailing address where I might send a big, fat letter describing my plight. Grr…
By Steven on Oct 12, 2007