Email or Account Suspended for Spam or Abuse Print

What happened

If your email sending has been disabled with a notice referring to spam, abuse, or a violation of our Acceptable Usage Policy, it means activity on your account crossed a line that endangers other clients on the server or the server's sending reputation. For most causes this is an email-level suspension, and it is containment rather than punishment: sending is stopped while the cause is identified and fixed, and the rest of your hosting keeps running. The exception, covered below, is phishing and spoofing, which is not a suspension at all.

What triggers an email suspension

• Abuse of the hourly sending limits. Repeatedly hitting the limits covered in our article on the Max Defers and Failures Per Hour error, in a pattern that points at bulk sending problems rather than a once-off mistake.
• A compromised account. A hacked mailbox or website script sending spam under your name. This is the most common cause we see, and in this case you are a victim too, but the sending still has to be stopped while the account is secured.
• Spam complaints. Recipients marking your mail as spam, in volume, whether from a compromised mailbox or from bulk sending to people who never opted in.
• Repeated blacklist incidents traced to your account, which affect every client sharing the server.
• Bulk mail practices that violate the Acceptable Usage Policy, such as bought lists, scraped addresses, or missing unsubscribe handling.

Phishing and spoofing: zero tolerance

Phishing (websites or mail designed to steal credentials, banking details, or personal information, including sites dressed up in another company's branding) and spoofing (impersonating another person, brand, or organisation, whether in email content or by registering a lookalike domain of an existing business) are treated differently from every other category above. These cases do not result in a suspension with a path back. There is no warning and no remediation:

• A takedown notification is issued on discovery and access is cut immediately.
• The entire hosted account, the website, mailboxes, files, and data, is deleted from the server within 24 hours. This is a termination, and deleted content is not recoverable.
• Evidence may be shared with the South African Police Service and other relevant authorities. Phishing is a crime, and we cooperate fully with law enforcement.

This applies whether the impersonation was set up deliberately or planted through a compromised website. If your site is hacked and used for phishing, the phishing content is removed and the account secured regardless, which is one more reason to keep your site and passwords maintained before it ever gets to that point.

What to do if your email is suspended

1. Reply to the suspension notice or open a support ticket from your registered client email. If the suspension affects the mailbox you would normally contact us from, use an alternative address, or reach us on WhatsApp if email is unavailable to you entirely.
2. Do not simply ask for reactivation, address the cause. Tell us what you know: whether you were bulk sending, whether you suspect a compromise, what changed recently. Reactivating with the cause still live results in a second suspension within hours.
3. If the cause was a compromise: all passwords on the account get changed, the website gets updated and scanned, and malicious files get removed, before sending is re-enabled. See our article on the signs of a compromised email account for the checklist.
4. If the cause was your own bulk sending: reactivation comes with conditions, a cleaned opt-in list, working unsubscribe handling, and in most cases moving bulk mail to a purpose-built newsletter service rather than the hosting mail server.

Good to know

Email suspensions are almost always recoverable, usually the same day, once the cause is genuinely dealt with. We would far rather help you secure a hacked site than lose a client, and the fastest route back is a ticket that engages with the cause honestly. The only unrecoverable category is the one described above: phishing and spoofing end the relationship, permanently, every time.