An Account can be suspended due to spam if TFhost has been notified of objectionable email originating from that account. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) has determined that the email coming from the account qualifies as “spam” and TFhost has been asked to deal with the issue. As TFhost operates a shared hosting environment, we must suspend “spammy” accounts in order to protect the other accounts hosted on the same server.
If your account has been suspended due to spam, here are some causes and how to resolve the issue.
Was your account hijacked?
It is possible that you are the victim of an unauthorized person using your account to send out spam. If this is the case, you must ensure your account is secure before we will permanently unsuspend it. We may temporarily remove the suspension so you can work on the account, but there will be a strict deadline for completing the work.
- If you are using a script for your website (e.g., Soholaunch, WordPress, Joomla, etc.) or large mail-outs, check with your script provider for updates. If new updates are available, please apply them to your site.
- If the script provider no longer updates the script, switch to another one, ideally one that’s popular enough to ensure you won’t go through this again anytime soon.
- If you have no new script to use, disable the old one.
- Contact us again, and we will review your account. We will reactivate it if it is safe for us to do so.
Was the problem due to a form script?
Interactive forms are a convenient way of allowing visitors to your website to provide information and have it emailed to you. Unfortunately, there are automated programs designed to make use of these forms as a way of dumping a lot of spam into your mailbox. If your email account is actually elsewhere (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo or just a different website hosting account), it will appear that your email account is receiving a large amount of spam from your TFhost account.
In order to keep your form from being used this way, you need to add a feature like “CAPTCHA.” This is a plug-in which will add a “type the word you see in this picture” field to your form, and will not send the information in your form until this field is properly completed.
You can find out more about CAPTCHA from the official website http://www.captcha.net
The steps for implementing this feature on your forms will depend on how you designed your website. If you used a content management system like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla you will need to go to the respective support website for instructions. If you designed the website yourself, you will need to add the CAPTCHA code directly to your page.
If you are using Soholaunch for your website, the CAPTCHA plug-in is available for free and can be downloaded from here:
Were you sending out bulk emails?
If you were sending mass mailings that were identified as spam (even mistakenly), you will need to find another service to send your email. TFhost is not equipped to support bulk emailing, and if your account has become suspended it is because you have exceeded our limits.
Severe Cases
Some issues are too severe to risk removing the suspension on the account in order to fix the problem. In these cases, we will let you know that your account will need to be “reset;” that is, erased and recreated. If a reset is needed, our technical staff will discuss it with you before taking any action.
