Westhosted Spammer - Attn: Mark Cox

[theplex]

I'm a Canadian journalist and have tracked a pharmaceutical spammer to Westhost. This is a particularly annoying spammer and my early research suggests he shouldn't be selling what he's selling through his website. (Waiting for several callbacks to confirm the legality of his site.) I have spoken directly with the website owner, who told me that he wasn't spamming me, that I was actually spamming myself. (I've been writing about information technology for 35 years, and running our mailservers here for 15, so do know a bit about how this stuff works.)

I wrote to Westhost requesting an interview about this issue, and received the following email (I've removed the phone numbers and advertising message from the email. It's otherwise intact.):

Dear George:

Thank you for contacting WestHost. I'm afraid we will not be able to do an interview at this time. However, you are welcome to post questions on our forums at:
http://forums.westhost.com/

Best Regards,

Mark Cox
Data Center Administrator
WestHost

Admittedly this is a somewhat unusual way to conduct an interview, but if that's how it has to be, then I'll give it a whirl.

So, Mark, I'd like to know why Westhost would provide hosting to a pharmaceutical spammer, somebody who does not appear to be a pharmacist but is selling prescription drugs from a website hosted by Westhost.

Is this an isolated incident, or are there more of this type of customer at Westhost?

Have you had any complaints about this spammer?

Have reports about this spammer to SpamCop and other anti-spam reporting sites had any impact on your legitimate customers?

The Westhost privacy policy - http://www.westhost.com/terms-conditions.html - appears to prohibit spamming, either directly of via a third party, for content hosted at Westhost. Is this policy actually enforced or is it there for show?

Looking foward to your response.

Regards,
George

[WestHost - CReeves]

Dear George,

I do not think it was Mark’s intent in his response for you to do a WestHost interview over our client forums. I believe his intent was to direct you here if you had related questions that other clients have possibly dealt with. Having said this, I’ll give you some input on the questions you have posed.

We do not allow SPAM on our servers as per our Terms of Service. We knowingly would not provide service to someone with the intent to send SPAM. If we receive complaints we review those and address them appropriately if we can find that they are indeed breaking our SPAM policy. Our SPAM policy is not only in place to protect WestHost but also our clients. We take these matters very seriously. I will do some research on the client in question.

If you have further questions regarding this please feel free to contact me directly ( creeves@westhost.com ). You may also contact our Technical Support department at any time if you have additional questions regarding our SPAM policies.

[theplex]

Thank you for the response, Clint. It did seem like an odd suggestion. I wrote back to Mark but, when there was no reply, posted my questions to the forum.

I will write directly to you via email later in the week.

Regards,
George

[WestHost - MCox]

Dear George:

I was under the impression you just had questions about spamming in general.

Spamming is against our Terms and Conditions of use. If you are having problems with receiving spam messages from a WestHost client, please submit detailed information about the issue to abuse@westhost.com and we will be happy to look into the issue.