E-mail Sending and Restrictions

First of all, it is important to emphasize that these restrictions are not evil and are not primarily directed against our customers.

We do not do it at all because we assume that our customers are naughty and that they want to use our web hosting services to send spam. The most common causes and sources of spam are completely different and the customer is most often innocent.

Common Causes and Sources of Spam:

• A security hole in a PHP script that allows it to be misused – for example, posting posts to a forum (then sending new posts to forum members), a bug directly in the contact form, and so on.
• Stealing FTP account passwords (usually from a virus-infected home PC), the attacker then places a malicious PHP script on the customer’s website, which they then use to spam massively. The customer does not have to know at all.
• A bug in the customer’s PHP script, which, for example, ‘loops’ and starts to send out e-mails unexpectedly.

Customers deliberately sending out spam is the last thing that happens and that we have to deal with.

Why, then, are these restrictions in place? Again, this is because the web hosting service is shared. Hence, hundreds of customers have their pages on one web server. If one of the sites begins (for any reason) to send messages in bulk and is subsequently blocked by an email server, everyone else from the same server will be blocked (because all sites have the same IP address).

E-mail servers over the Internet protect their users and customers by blocking the source of a suspicious number of e-mail messages from one source. This blocking can be temporary but also permanent. If they choose to permanently block all e-mails from our web hosting services, no customer will send anything to them (not even regular requested messages). Surely none of our customers want that.

Why isn’t the limit being dealt with when something happens? The solution must be preventive. It is too late once an attacker finds a loophole in your site’s security and starts exploiting it for mass spamming. Before we find out, analyze, and implement measures, an attacker could already have sent out tens of millions of messages, and by then the webserver would have been blocked in various places on the Internet.

This solution is not evil. Do not take it as a restriction directed against you. Take it as your protection against the misuse of your site for illegal activities. With this precautionary measure, we can ensure that the right solicited emails always reach your customers, friends, visitors, etc. from your site.