Reference: Notices-RSU for Email

18 November 2010

Effective immediately, RidgeStar announces a re-allocation of the POP3 and Email RSU Resources and a reduction in the allocated RSU rates for Hits of 10%.

This adjustment has been motivated by increasing time and costs related to the operation of traditional Internet Mail Service, which has been steadily on the rise. Our original approach to distributing costs of Mail Service was to simply count defined Elements (POP3 accounts, Forwarders, etc.). But, this approach has proven incapable of allocating costs fairly across the clients. Essentially, this adjustment is an effort to shift the costs of operating Mail Service onto the clients that make use of Mail Service most heavily.

As a result, if you (as a RidgeStar client) make limited use of the RidgeStar Mail Service, your RSU consumption should decrease (eventually leading to a lower Service Tier and a lower annual billing). On the other hand, if you make extensive or heavy use of the RidgeStar Mail Service, your RSU Consumption should increase, which may lead to a higher Service Tier and a higher annual billing.

The technical description for the specific changes can be stated as:

#	Service	Old RSU	New RSU	New Description
1	Email	10	0.001	Email message handled by the Mail Server
2	Hits	0.0025	0.00225	an HTTP request
3	POP3	30	0.001	Mail Server Login activity

The net effect of this change in pricing and Fee allocation will be dependent upon the individual Domain(s) and whether or not the Domain's RSU consumption is significantly impacted by Email, Hits, and/or POP3 Resources.

Why Change the RSU Fees?

The rationale behind any adjustment to Service Fees is made up of several factors, including but not limited to:

1. How to fairly distribute costs of operations across all Clients
2. Overall Business tactical strategy and objectives
3. Encouraging desired behavior

Email

This Resource used to simply count how many Mail Server definitions were in effect for your Domain. Now, this Resource actually contains the number of Messages that were associated with your Domain that the Mail Service had to process. This includes any Email sent to or received by the Mail Server for any Email address in your Domain (including email initiated by your site using mechanisms such as "Bulk Mail").

Additionally, the size of the Messages (in bytes) is now added into the Bandwidth Resource (see your site at Administrator: RidgeStar-SMTP for the daily details).

Hits

Unrelated specifically to the re-allocation of the Mail Service overhead, we have observed a recent increase in the activity between clients (specifically, imlementation of SOAP/XML service). This appears to the site as an increase in Hits from external requests (which it is) and will drive the number of Hits up.

We'd like to encourage this architecture and inter-connectivity and, as a result, are reducing RSU charges for Hits to support this approach.

POP3

This Resource used to represent the number of full function POP3 accounts that were active in your Domain. Now, this Resource represents the number of times a valid User of your Domain logs into the Mail Server.

For those clients using a Mail Client on their desktop, this is the number of times a Mail Client connected to the RidgeStar Mail Server to check for or send messages. We recommend that you set this interval to checking every 5 minutes or so. You're welcome to set it to a higher frequency, but....we've set the RSU Factor to discourage this...however it remains your choice.

When it will take effect

The modification to the RSU Fee Scale for Email, Hits, and POP3 is being put into effect today (November 18, 2010) and will be reflected immediately across all RidgeStar sites via Administrator: RidgeStar-RSU Chart.

The October 2010 Performance statistics DO reflect the revised approach. Performance statistics prior to October 2010 will contain the older values, that existed at that point in time.