A few weeks ago we setup a free web hosting service dedicated to especially PHP/MySQL hosting and we aim to offer general programming support as well for our users.

Within two days we had more than 700 users and after almost 3 weeks we have 2500 users. Everything has been great except for two users which have caused some problems.

Two two people have spammed thousands of people and they hosted their site through us (they didn't send the mail through us as we don't offer mail services). Now our domain has been banned by AOL (not that funny actually), sp I wanted to hear if anyone have any suggestions on how we can solve this and be "unbanned" again?

We are currently working on a new signup procedure and security is our most important term when we work on new features. But we also realize that SPAM cannot be avoided.

Hope you can help.

This is a perennial problem with sites offering free hosting and/or free e-mail. There are some steps that might reduce the probablility of the problem occuring again. Here's what I would do in your position:

1. Make certain your TOS (terms of service) make it clear that :
a. you will not host sites involved in spamming, even indirectly (whn your servers are not used for the e-mails)
b. you will terminate any web sites involved in spamming immediately (you could suspend them pending confirmation that it is involved in a spam rum - of course, if you require a spam message be sent to you with headers, as others do, most of the time there will be no doubt)
2. Define spam accurately in your TOS. I'll be glad to help if you need it.
3. Change your enrollment form to include a description of the nature of their site and configure it so that they must acknowledge having read and accepted your TOS upon submission.
4. Review new sites as you are able.

Once you have taken adequate measure to prevent a reoccurence, you might contact AOL, inform them of the steps you have taken, and ask that they consider unblocking your domain.

Any free hosting and/or e-mail site runs this same risk. Unless they take adequate steps to keep abuse at a minimum, many compa ies and server administrators will simply block them rather than be bothered with handling the spam that emanates from them.

Thanks for your suggestions. We have done everything to secure this and I also contacted AOL. Of course I just received a mail where I should contact "THERE ONLINE STAFF" as mentioned in the e-mail. I will browse the AOL company pages for a few more minutes to find the correct e-mail address (if any).

Tox, what kind of spam was this? I know AOL dosn't do too many bannings. Your two users must have bombed them really good to get you black listed.

Both was just some kind of "Work Home" thing but was pretty heavy both of them even though we didn't provide any mail access. It was just because the address in the SPAM at the bottom but towards their account at our service.

And can I say that the AOL support must be the dumbest people around as they keep telling me to use the keyword feature in the AOL browser (I'm from DEnmark and NOT an AOL customer). After the third e-mail they actually found out that I wasn't a customer and told me I could call them for free 7 says a week (yippee).

If I don't get a decent reply from my last mail I will simply give up as I don't have the patience to explain them this is not a customer issue...