DNJournal is down?

[David G]

Several yrs ago (before I got my dedicated server) I had my email acct at AT&T shut down because of a single (incorrect) spam complaint they received. That was done with no investigation at all, or even a notification to me, and I lost lots of important emails before I could open a new acct elsewhere. Again, what idiots they all are.

P.S. The odd thing is no one seems to shut down the big-time real spammers who send out millions of spams as the spam problem gets worse and worse as time goes by.

[Duke]

Duke -

If this EVER happens again, post it here and we'll have a few dozen people file dozens of spam complaints with SpamCop. We'll see how THEY deal with their online business taken offline.

That would be poetic justice.

[JMJ]

I'm having the same problem here. Turns out the spammer was using formmail to send Spam through our server. Since we found the source yesterday within a short time the total of blocked emails flowing through our server was in the neighborhood of 50,000. Fortunately I don't have to worry about the upstream shutting me down but it's one hell of a mess to clean up and get unlisted.

After disabling formmail altogether on the server things went haywire and our server configuration somehow got all screwed up. I'm not sure if this is a result of a hacking attempt or what but it was very coincidental that it happened once we shut down the spammer.

[Momentum]

Hi Ron,

I know how it feels to have your Hosting account shut down because of spoofed emails. This has happened to me 2 times in the last 6 months. And I am not talking about just the one website/domain that was spoofed in the emails, but I am talking about an entire reseller account with hundreds of active domain names being shut down entirely.

I was always able to get my accounts back online but there was still at least 24 hours of downtime. This is one of the reasons that I use many different reseller hosting accounts to host my portfolio. I also use Voxtreme and have found them to be very reliable so I am surprised by their knee-jerk reaction. The web hosts which shut down my entire reseller accounts with no warning whatsoever are Dathorn and CredibleHost. These companies offer great hosting packages but I was very disappointed that they would shut down my reseller accounts without any kind of investigation or warning.

Since many hosting companies will shut you down without any warning, I recommend using an uptime monitor to notify you if any of your most important websites are down. Anyway, hopefully Voxtreme has learned their lesson and maybe next time they will take 5 minutes to check into spam complaints.

[Duke]

Wow - I am amazed at how widespread this problem is. It is just absurd that some of these companies do this. The damage they inflict on innocent clients with live commercial sites is unbelievable. I was just lucky I noticed this happen on my account right away. If I had been out of town (or with no power as so many people in Florida are now after the hurricane, I could have been down for days without knowing it). Voxtreme was grade A in every category in my book until this happened. I am going to take Matt at his word that it won't happen again.

[Steen]

servers (dedicated) getting shut down due to spoofed adresses is nothing new. I am suprised how common it is though, when it's so easy to spoof an email address. Check out: http://www.anything.com/email.html - I bet they get this problem a lot and that's one way they combat it.

[Dave Zan]

Duke, if your Hosting provider Voxtreme shut you down w/o notice
(although kudos to them & their CEO for bringing your site up),
imagine your domain registrar doing that as well for whatever
reason!

Unfortunately, if you check their TOS/SA whatever, I won't be
surprised if they have a clause wherein they'll not be held liable
for any downtime for any reason whatsoever. It's a popular
disclaimer among registrars, resellers, and hosting providers...