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What to do about this customer?
Hey, so a while ago I started my hosting reseller company up again, it’s going pretty well, got about 6 paying customers currently. Anyways, a few days ago a customer signed up (web hosting), and yesterday I get an automated email from the DirectAdmin panel telling me they had sent 200+ emails in one day.. So I go look at their usage stats really quick, and I see 1844 emails! What should I do about this? I am obviously going to email them, I highly doubt their service was compromised since it was only recently activated.
I mean, should I just go and terminate them? Only thing is, I really don’t want to them leave a bad review anywhere, as that would completely ruin my business for the future.
Comments
What is the problem for you?
Well, I obviously don’t want the IP that is shared among all the clients (and my site as well) to be email blacklisted.
Explain that to your customer.
Define reasonable usage? Add restriction(s) in your Terms and Conditions.
Yeah, I’ll definitely add something to the TOS and email them soon, thanks for the advice.
The fact that the customer sent 200 emails or 1844 emails means nothing, what sort of emails were these? There are legitimate scenarios which would explain these volumes of emails.
If it's Spammer, put him behind a barn and shoot him
Put an per-email pricing for him/her. Like €10/email.
Set the limit to be (say) 500 emails a day, with the possibility of raising that limit if justified.
poor guys. you obviously have no clue what you are doing, yet people rely on you and will end up taking collateral damage...
the cause for that amount of mails can be as simple as failing cronjobs sending a notification each time to the very same guy (e.g. per minute).
or intentionally sending spam mails to over a thousand recipients...
don't think that really would help in either case, 500 spam mails daily will hurt about as much 2k at least for the IPs reputation and a high amount of notifications can be perfectly fine but blocks the client from other legitimate mail ;-)
"soon" is too late. now. simple.
and check the damn log to narrow down on the pattern. timely, senders, recipients etc.
My honest advice here is to refund all 6 of your clients and release them so they can find a competent provider moving forward.
Welp, while I wasn't asking for criticism, I certainly got some, anyways.. no more emails have been sent as of currently, and the client has been emailed. Will go forward from here.
Don't let them to win
We like drammas
Oh, I wont, if I see any more emails, that's it for them. (And yes, I am still able to send emails to my personal gmail just fine, so nothing has been blocked apparently, I'll still check my IP to see if its on any blacklists though.)
Spammers will typically send that number of emails in matter of minutes, not a day ....
Just set max number of emails per hour/day for each customer/domain and also do you sell reseller accounts or you have a reseller account ?
If it's your server you should probably check the mailque and check mail content/headers of mails that are still in mailque it should help you figure out if it's a spammer or a legit user
If you can't get past this fear you won't get very far.
The end is nigh.
Grep the logs to find out the email subjects and recipients. Are they sending themselves a bunch of notification emails, for example? Are they sending a newsletter? Is there a high bounce rate?
https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/how-to-read-an-exim-maillog/
https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/digging-into-exim-mail-logs-with-exigrep/
Not much difference between cPanel, which these were written for, and DA. Ex. /var/log/exim_mainlog is instead /var/log/exim/mainlog.
If they sent 1800 emails from one shared IP to Gmail in a day, for example, no matter what the reason the rest of your customers may be unable to email users at Gmail for hours. Rate limiting hurts.
This is a reseller account, so I don't have direct access to the server. No reply to my email I sent this morning, but no more emails sent either.
Edit: turns out the limit was somehow set to 1000 somewhere else, thought it was 200, only thing is, I cant actually change the limit because of a permission my reseller account doesn't have..