HI,
I would like to post this question to dedicated servers/ colo providers out there. If your client runs a mailing list service from the server sending 300,000 opt-in emails a day and there are 20 to 50 complaints a day, how do you handle or manage those complaints ? Will you get any trouble getting IPs from ARIN and trouble with bandwidth providers?

Any feedback would be greatly apprciated.

Thanks.

I have zero tolerance for spamming - if I get a complaint about a customer and it checks out they get a warning, if it happens again the account is closed no questions asked.

I feel it's your duty as a responsible host to PREVENT spam, not provide the facilities for it . . . .

That is exaclty what I do. No 3 strikes your out! Second time and your gone. Remember as a web host you not only have a duty to your clients but to all the internet users in the world. You are putting up a public service that all internet users are connected to. Think about this next time you warn a spammer and tell him this.

the prase 'auto-delete' comes to mind..... no AUP allows for spam and you only end up having your IP range blocked by ISP's / universities and other large organisations....

Plus....getting a tonne of spamcop eMails daily because of the website should make your mind up pretty quickly!

Anyway, unless you're a RIPE / ARIN member, your provider will tell you whats what pretty sharpish ;)

Cheers,

pretty simple, immediate termination. ;) Even we don't receive any complains, we (i my self) go through logs 3 times a day) and check if there is any spam i immediate terminate the account on finding out the list. Now i am become very familiar with who people spam. Many times i have tracked the proccess and terminated the account within 10 minutes. ;) These people don't understand they are creating lots of mess by spaming. :angry:

The worst part is that i always get charged back from spamer customers. :angry: Any ideas what to do with that. I collect payments through ibill.com. !!

:rolleyes:

Come on guys. Easy to say that you are against SPAM - who isn't but look at this particular case where there are 20 to 50 complaints out of 300,000 opt-in emails a day. That does not seems like SPAM, but rather sounds like people forgot they opted-in or something like that.
Real spam must get a lot higher complaint/sent mails ratio.


The guy is asking what to do, I see the dilemma it is probably a good ( on a dedicated plan ) customer and wants to know if these complaints will harm him/his company in the future.

true to a point, but its well known that these 'opt in' lists are now the best way of spamming and trying to justify not....

Dear <spamified>

thank you for joining our mailing list....

blah...blah...spam...spam....


A Spammer...


Most people dont opt in to these....its a spammers dream these days....

" but it was an opt in list guvnor, honest! "

Yea right....tell it to spamcop ;)

You have to be careful though. When I was running my site, with an OPT-IN email list - some guy told me that I spammed him. I told him the list is opt-in and he must have signed up, so he called me a liar and reported me to the FBI.

Luckily he remembered a couple of days later and the issue was sorted out - however simply assuming the worst can get people in all sorts of trouble.

Some sites, like mine only ever emailed the list every few months when there is important news or changes to the privacy policy - so people can forget.

If you are going to run a list now a days, you really need to login there I.P. address and the date they signed up so you can atleast have some sort of defense or something to remind them if you do get accused.

Most of the time it is spam though.

True Michael!

I did say most though ;)

Sounds a bit rough on you though! The FBI ??? !! Do they actually care?

I can just imaging the door being kicked in and the butt of a gun sorting me out for spamming! ;)

Maybe i'll move to the US....never mind the 50x cheaper bandwidth!

Cheers,

Yeah - Snipers on my neighbours roof. Swat team in my back yard. It was terrible :)

Sounds a bit rough on you though! The FBI ??? !! Do they actually care? Not unless you did something VERY illegal or had/caused a monetary loss of > $10,000.00. :)

300,000 people really agreed to be spammed, hanh? That's a lot.

If one of our users could prove to us that the user agreed to being emailed, then we wouldn't worry about it.

Otherwise, depending on the circumstances, we may give a warning, or may just terminate their account.

We have a user that has done some pretty big opt-in bulk emailing (10,000 addresses). He sells software, and was giving away some software for free to people registering and agreeing to receive sales email. We didn't get a single spam complaint though. But his site did get a denial of service attack for a day once.

But if you're getting 50 spam complaints, I think that something is being done incorrectly by the sender. And you might have to ask them to stop or you'll have to start billing them for the hours you spend going through the spam complaints.

We told one of our users running vbulletin that if he didn't turn off the "email me when someone replies to my thread" feature that we'd have to start billing him. It was a gaming site and the number of invalid email addresses was crazy. Our postmaster account was getting thousands of bounced emails a day.

Originally posted by jonny b
Sounds a bit rough on you though! The FBI ??? !! Do they actually care?

I can just imaging the door being kicked in and the butt of a gun sorting me out for spamming!

Oh, they don't kick your door in. Not for spamming anyway. But they'll send three agents (all in dark blue windbreakers with "FBI" in huge yellow letters on the back - scared the hell out of the folks at the insurance company downstairs) with a subpoena for your log files.

by ASPCode.net
Come on guys. Easy to say that you are against SPAM - who isn't but look at this particular case where there are 20 to 50 complaints out of 300,000 opt-in emails a day.

There is only one problem.

How many of you complain when you receive spam? I simply press the delete key. Perhaps another 299'950 people do the same? ... and more than likely, the list isn't opt-in.

Originally posted by ASPCode.net
Come on guys. Easy to say that you are against SPAM - who isn't but look at this particular case where there are 20 to 50 complaints out of 300,000 opt-in emails a day. That does not seems like SPAM, but rather sounds like people forgot they opted-in or something like that.
Real spam must get a lot higher complaint/sent mails ratio.


The guy is asking what to do, I see the dilemma it is probably a good ( on a dedicated plan ) customer and wants to know if these complaints will harm him/his company in the future.

Haha, yes, real spam will get you more like THOUSANDS of complaints and DOZENS to spamcop.

This honestly sounds more like people just forgetting, 20-50 out of 300K? that's 0.01% complains, real spam will net you more like 10%

I would suggest cancel any account that does spam. otherwise you may end up with a lot of legal issues.

You aim is to be a good hosting provider. Spam increases server load too.. This makes other angry .


Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

Come on guys. Easy to say that you are against SPAM - who isn't but look at this particular case where there are 20 to 50 complaints out of 300,000 opt-in emails a day. That does not seems like SPAM, but rather sounds like people forgot they opted-in or something like that.

Not true. Especially if this person knows what they are doing. Like false from and reply tos. Don't fall for the stupid person reponse "I bought an opt-in list. I am not spamming." Explain to him that 300,000 didn't opt-in. Someone will end up on the list that didn't want to be. You give one more chance, to counter the "stupid spammer" response, then if it happens again - cancel.

If this is their personal list from their site, look at the traffic they get. If they have 100,000 unique visitors in a year, I highly doubt they will have a 300,000 opt-in list. I read somewhere that the average opt-in rate is like 100:1 for visitors:subscribers. Not sure if this is true, but if it were, this site would need 30 million unique visitors.

'Double Opt-in' is really the best way to manage a list and a good way to teach people who run list how to ensure the list is as clean as it will get. Just my 2.

How about the one who sets up a new account, waits a few days, uploads a few suspicious looking scripts and then waits few more days....
Then, on Sunday at 14:24 EDT quickly uploads a 54800 line email list and immediately commences to spamming away.

I caught him/her after 1632 emails thank god!

"But it was an opt-in list...honest!!"

Goodbye...

Eric,

Eric,
If you have a client sending 300,000 list subscribers, you should ask him to go to some other provider if you are not too big.

It's very easy to say that "WE ARE AGAINST SPAM" but when you have 300,000 subscribers, you will get at least 3 complaints after each mailing. All the free email sites like hotmail.com or myownemail.com get 1000s of complaints daily, same is the case with network marketing companies having 100000 affiliates, all of them trying to advertise the same site. These sites are never shut down by the providers due to Spam complaints, because they need special hosts ... BIG HOSTS.

People who have posted here are correct from their own frame of reference but when it comes to BIG sites ... rules are different ... you can't shut them down on single Spam complaint.

But if you are not so BIG ....you should ask the client to shift the servers.

Before getting a hosting solution for such site, you must talk with the company .. and get a managed hosting (expensive). Even then you must have a very very strict Spam policy. Also, you have to be very efficient in un-subscribing the members on request, it's better to make the process automatic.

The most difficult issue I have ever dealt with online is Spam. There is no complete solution :(

"same is the case with network marketing companies having 100000 affiliates, all of them trying to advertise the same site. These sites are never shut down by the providers due to Spam complaints, because they need special hosts ... BIG HOSTS"

I am also planning on such an affiliate website which will have about 10,000 affiliates. Can someone please give me guidance on which type of hosting should I go for (at a reasonable cost) where the hosts are more tolerant of the spam-complaints?

thanks...........

Originally posted by Michael_Bray
You have to be careful though. When I was running my site, with an OPT-IN email list - some guy told me that I spammed him. I told him the list is opt-in and he must have signed up, so he called me a liar and reported me to the FBI.

Luckily he remembered a couple of days later and the issue was sorted out - however simply assuming the worst can get people in all sorts of trouble.

Some sites, like mine only ever emailed the list every few months when there is important news or changes to the privacy policy - so people can forget.

If you are going to run a list now a days, you really need to login there I.P. address and the date they signed up so you can atleast have some sort of defense or something to remind them if you do get accused.

Most of the time it is spam though.

Also get mail headers before saying it's spam. I sometimes get spam from email1@mydomain.com to email2@mydomain.com which I know isn't true since I have own both.

It's rather funny when you think about how many times nobody.com, mydomain.com, localhost.com, etc. gets reported for spam :P

Originally posted by mahinder
pretty simple, immediate termination. ;) Even we don't receive any complains, we (i my self) go through logs 3 times a day) and check if there is any spam i immediate terminate the account on finding out the list. Now i am become very familiar with who people spam. Many times i have tracked the proccess and terminated the account within 10 minutes. ;) These people don't understand they are creating lots of mess by spaming. :angry:

The worst part is that i always get charged back from spamer customers. :angry: Any ideas what to do with that. I collect payments through ibill.com. !!

:rolleyes:

how do you check that your server was used to spam?since there no customer complaint?If you have a about 500 clients hosting and what is the best way to trace them down if you know them using ur server to spam ?thanks