Perhaps you many want to read the whole article, including this important update at the very bottom
"Update: 2005-02-26
After extensive pressure, MCI finally relented and let go of send-safe.com."
Perhaps MCI did turn a blind eye to their customer who in turn was hosting the illegal spam operation but they did not do so for long under pressure from the Internet community. I also know from experience that unless you are paying MCI a cool 5 million to turn a blind eye you can forget about escaping their UCE policy and they have one of the toughest enforcement teams out there among bandwidth providers. It works like this,
1. You or one of your hosted customers sends spam
2. that spam is reported to spamhaus.org spamcop.net and many other anti-spam blacklisting organizations.
3. Those organizations place your hosting company email server on their blacklist of IP's (most of the time without any research to validate the claim)
4. Thousands of ISP and hosting companies subscribe to these blacklisting services and their databases on their email servers automatically block ALL email coming from an IP address on the blacklist
5. Even if you convice these organizations to remove your email server IP address from their master blacklist databases (the process usually takes several days and much staff time) those that subscribe to the list may or may not drop your IP from their list after the update. In other words, your IP address may be stuck on major ISP blacklists for months, years! (Think AOL, Earthlink, and other large ISPs blocking email from your servers forever and how your hosting customers will respond to that).
6. You as the hosting company may receive an email from these organizations if you are subscribed and/or have an abuse@yourcompany address registered with them warning about the reported spam.
7. Your bandwidth provider (or reseller company) will most definitely receive a report and they will then in turn send you a very strong warning to remove the offending spammer immeadiately or risk having your ENTIRE OPERATIONAL BANDWIDTH connection suspended until you comply. That means ALL of your hosted customer sites are down, no email, no site, no business.
That is the way it works my black hat friend so you will have to learn to play by the rules, work hard and smart and earn your customers trust before you can do business with them and expect them to be loyal to your brand. I have been in the hosting industry nearly 10 years now and have seen so many young hosting startups fail right out of the gate because they attempted to bend the rules and went on a spaming spree. Never have I seen any successful companies use such tactics and I know ours certainly would never even consider it. Sure it may be tempting, but the risk is too high and a hosting company who spams or permits spam on their servers will fail unless you have many millions to pay off your upstream provider or you are the upstream provider. Even then, public pressure, lawsuits and business appearance in the marketplace will cause you to rethink your ways such as MCI had to do!
Best Wishes for a .Net Spam Free Success!
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