Huh. For some reason, I'd never considered that people might be willing to pay for a remote "on call sysadmin". We already admin a handful of mail servers, that's something we could add to our services.
When you have services like Intermedia.net doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you, it's insanely easy to sell mail as a service. I will say though, Intermedia is a LITTLE trigger happy with their routing security; one of our PC's had a malware infection, already quarantined and was pending removal. Our entire IP range was banned until it got cleaned up, and the machine itself was a DMZ'd test machine that we purposely infect regularly for "war games" etc, so it had no email clients, didn't even send any messages.
There's a reason for this. It occurred to me the other day, after dealing with a stupid hover.com problem, that it has become almost impossible for network admins at different networks to talk to each-other.
I have never, not once, in the five or six years I've been doing network admin work, been able to contact another network admin to report a problem. Instead, I have to go through incompetent and clueless frontline support first, and spend hours or days navigating that until the problem is no longer relevant anymore or I give up.
It became obvious that I wasn't the only one that had given up on contacting network admins when I recently had to deal with a spam issue (same spammer, multiple hosting providers, new technique) -- while I tried following the RBL rules, it was clear that other service providers entirely skipped the "notify the network admin, give them reasonable time to resolve the problem before nominating their block for the RBL" step. the victim networks all became listed on the RBLs within just a few hours of the first waves of spam.
It's just gotten to be too much trouble, nobody bothers anymore, and unfortunately that will have to include me from now on too. If I see bad behavior coming from another network, I won't any longer even try to contact anybody at the other network; I'll just ban their IP and move on.
Your post is spot on and I've felt every frustration you've outlined. I maybe should have clarified my post originally to suggest I'm not entirely suggesting this is a fault of Intermedia, as they don't know our internal systems architecture. But getting the issue resolved and being able to get the message relayed that the machine posed virtually no threat to an admin who could have done something about it was just as much of a chore as you've just explained.
Granted, the hilarious irony in this is that it was Intermedia who pointed out "there's an infected machine" on your network, so all of the wrangling around and sending tracert outputs, just to get a reply weeks later "This IP address is infected" and the resulting "That's what it was? That machine is just for testing, we know it's infected." was a bit of a grind.