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It may be beneficial to read more of the thread. The short answer is no.
Not unless you tripped, fell, and accidentally landed on a subdomain with "marketing" in the name, and started sending out hundreds of relevant (read: looks contextually appropriate for domain and recipients) emails to a non opt-in list within 24 hours of signing up. If you're worried that might be you, you're not worried about a compromised script or password. I know what that looks like, this is what I do.
Honestly the worst spammers who compromise Wordpress installations to send spam don't even have very many fake recipients. They're actually pretty good about keeping their lists clean lol
this is what I understood from reading the entire thread that a user could be billed with $500 if he sends 500 emails in the first day with some of them considered spam if they use a domain or subdomain containing "marketing".
Then it sounds like you may not understand very much about this, and may want to avoid the service.
There's no hard and fast rules here. I know intentional spam when I see it. If you try to draw lines around it and say "Only these actions result in it" then the spammer just says "Okay, cleaned my list and I don't have marketing in the domain name, now I can spam through MXroute."
If you're not intentionally sending spam, you have nothing to fear. If you think I don't know the difference, you haven't seen me in action. Out of tens of thousands of users only two have been invoiced for intentional spam. Thousands have been politely notified of compromised web scripts or passwords (not compromised from our side). None of this is automated, none of this happens without extensive research and human review.
Here's a look into a little bit of how I work:
First I receive alerts for unusual activity. Second I begin reviewing the logs. Third I start diving into context. What's the subject? Is there a recipient pattern? Is sender spoofed? How long have I known this customer? Is this out of character for them? Does the email subject match who they are or what they do? Am I receiving complaints? Are a large number of recipients invalid? Are the sender IPs distributed or single? Is there a link between the sender IP and the customer? Is the sender IP a web host that hosts their site?
This is what it's like to be me, you can't just summarize it with "Oh Jarland charges thousands of dollars to anyone who sends a few hundred emails" or "You can't have marketing in the domain name." None of that does any amount of justice for the work that goes into this.
@jar maybe you can forward this person's details to Hetzner's abuse team.
@jar nobody like spammers, they generate a lot of work/trouble, if we find abusers we terminate the service and don't refund.
But charging 500$ and blocking communication with that customer I personally see it as scary.
So you don't know anything about my business or how my support operates, but feel obligated to judge it? Just want to clear that up, thanks.
Luckily my customers aren't cowering in fear and know how to reach me, just like this one did, before they were cut off after receiving their answer in a public (but official) place where they could continue to reference it because they shouldn't be spamming slack or my community forum to argue about it. Those channels are for active customers and not people who already have their answer about why they're no longer customers. But you don't know anything about that, you're too scared to ask. It's easier to judge, I suppose.
They received their support, there was nothing more to discuss.
This kind of 'evidence' doesn't matter, you need to use 3d secure or whatever equivalents there may be, that's the only guarantee that clearing banks will accept. Had the same situations in the past with copious online/email evidence of a customer's ineptness, matters not. If they charge back you basically have no recourse.
IMHO refund the guy if you get a chargeback, use 3d secure any whatever other mechanisms available to you to protect yourself from ridiculous claims.
Can't reason with stupidity. In any event in the small time I've spent around here, I know email deliverability is your expertise, whereas for 99% of people here it isn't, and arguing the smaller details is a lost cause.
For the prices you charge I can't figure out with some high baller thinks they have a legit claim. Anyways.
based on this thread some potential customers which don't know how your support operates will draw the same conclusions like me, or if not maybe I'm special.
Sorry, this is how I see it, I'll stop here.
Aye, I did. All I really wanted out of it was some negative publicity for people who might be in a similar situation, so I got that and refunded. I've been having a lot of problems lately with people who have any number of excuses as to why they believe their unsolicited marketing email is not unsolicited marketing email, so I'm trying to think of creative ways to get the message out further short of flying banners over major cities.
Raise your prices by 500%
In the end, what's the price of an email. Can't be much less than the CPM of a half decent targeted ad, for the opted in of course. So the ROI is there for the legit lists.
To sum up this thread:
Someone was spamming, got caught, and is apparently not happy, but luckily is also banned.
Next.
OP was banned as per his own volition.
He swore he'd delete his account if @JarLard replied to him. Lard did and OP got banned.
I suppose I can't help that. You see, we were underwater with support tickets and received them at an excessive degree. The choices were:
This is why our front page now actually reads "Limited Support - We provide limited support, as well as community support." If that scares anyone off, that's actually a positive thing, because what we were doing was unsustainable. So I had this bright idea: Since all of these people are asking the same questions and just wording them in different ways, why don't I build a knowledgebase?
Well here's the thing about a knowledgebase: It answers questions in the way you see them. But a customer can look right at a question in a KB article and bypass it to open a ticket and ask the same question with slightly different wording. The reason? They didn't see their question there, even though it was. Think of it like this:
Person 1: "My server keeps going OOM."
Person 2: "Wordpress keeps displaying database connection errors."
In many cases these are actually the same question, but to the customer they're two different questions.
So this was my theory:
Create a customer driven knowledgebase in which the same question can be asked in a hundred (or more) different ways, and let the customers search for their answers. If they don't find it, they ask it in their way and I answer it. Eventually, more and more people will see their question in the way that they interpret it, and they'll find their answer without having to open a new topic. Of course, people can mask their information and we reach out privately if what they ask requires it, I'm not asking people to share private info in public. That's where the escalation path comes in:
We needed an escalation path beyond this for some situations. But to prevent everyone from skipping right to the escalation path, it needed to be more convenient to use the public KB. For that reason we have a Slack org set up and people can get on there and contact us. We go to appropriate lengths to verify accounts, etc. Now, the amount of escalations going directly to us are significantly less, and most people are getting what they need outside of it. The ones that aren't getting what they need outside of it are now experiencing a direct line of communication to us that provides the best support we've ever been able to provide.
To keep the public/community support channels free of excess and things that don't need to be discussed, when we terminate a customer for violating our policies we cut them off. There is no benefit to arguing, there are no false positives. We only do this to 1000000% verified spammers. If we're respectfully parting ways with a customer, this is not that bucket, they do not see that treatment.
Now, as a result, it is possible for some customers to still be upset at not reaching out to us directly when they want to argue about why they think it's okay for them to be a spammer, or if they absolutely refuse to do anything but escalate to us directly. These people are incompatible with our business, and we've made a choice to be willing to lose their business, because again none of that compares to the first three choices I had above in severity.
So now you might be a bit more prepared to judge how our support operates, and see what bucket you might fall into. It's okay if you don't like it. Sure it isn't perfect, but right now it's the best support we can offer, and the customers who are making use of it have been extremely satisfied, with exceptions being less than 5 total (not bad for tens of thousands of users, right?). Considering I started MXroute for sysadmins who didn't need much support and ended up attracting a whole different crowd, I think we're on a good path that is currently sustainable. As reality adjusts, so will we.
@JarLard, the way I see it, the dude is concerned about only the charge and nothing else.
Might as well not drive at all for him since a traffic ticket can be quite expensive.
The slack thing is really obnoxious, making people sign up for another damn account with another damn company in order to contact you. Some of us try to limit our number of signups, especially with mega corporations (slack is one now).
I definitely get that. I'm watching where people share that feedback too. So far the feedback hasn't outweighed the negatives from reverting, but they keep me thinking creatively about ways to move forward.
I don't get why you want to service the low end market, just jack up the prices and move on up. You're basically subsidising strangers to argue with you. Not trying to blow smoke up your arse but you can provide the service at a level where it's worthwhile for everyone including people who open tickets.
Lowend rage is the best advertising ever.
They think they are slamming their hosts/providers, but what they are doing is free marketing.
Surely not being automated means you'd be more likely to spot when someone is looking to abuse your services to send spam?
Oh yeah - you'd need to not be in on it for that to work. No sympathy from me, sorry.
This thread was fun.
A spammer caught and punished. @jar got some free marketing. Nobody cared about the let lawyer.
Although his stay was brief, I am going to miss the OP's swashbuckling style.
Something like this, to be precise - actually this, happened to @jar, and he dealt with it (you) nicely.
If you want to use chat instead of tickets that's one thing, but why not irc or nextcloud chat or whatever, instead of slack? If using a small company's product requires me to also sign up for a big-company product, in a way the small company's product becomes an add-on for the big-company's. It doesn't seem like a great place to be, unless you're actually marketing it as an add-on.
Number of pre-made integrations for things I wanted drew me to this.
Hmm, ok, though I wonder if the vendors for those integrations are also collecting your clients' info (I hope they are locally installed and don't communicate back to the vendor). Could there be a way to proxy your slack channel into irc or something like that? Maybe not, if the integrations do things like authenticate the slack user against your whmcs or something.
Bleh. How many integrations are we talking about and how many are there, if I can ask? If they're not too fancy I wonder if something similar could be done for nextcloud or an irc bot or something.
I didn’t really end up using any, there were just a lot of thoughts circling in my head about what I could do without much coding. Alerts, announcements, bots that check DNS for you or interact with popular knowledgebase applications to automate frequent queries, etc. I still might do some of those. Premade libraries for slack that are easily navigated by someone of my development skill level tend to be more so than most others.
Ic. I wonder if some of that stuff would be better off in the user's client area page, than in the support chat. LET provider knowledgebases IME are usually useless, because the KB has to be very large before it has a chance of containing many answers. Maybe a community support forum? It could even be a sub-forum of hostballs.
Oh have you not seen it? This is what I want to be the first line of support:
https://community.mxroute.com/
If anyone has a question that involves private information they can just mask it and make me figure it out, or I can contact them privately if need be. But most questions end up being capable of generic wording.
It uses a plugin that makes it work kind of like StackExchange.
This is that customer driven KB in my eyes, a place where a question can be asked so many ways that others start to actually see the questions that look like the way they think.
@willie there is an mxroute Q & A forum / knowledgebase (using Discourse).
Definitely agree that I personally prefer to avoid using Slack.