It’s good when your mail service shuts down a spammer operating from your account, right? But how about when your service shuts you down for sending out more emails than usual? That’s what happened to me this morning with my AOL accounts–the system put a block on my account so that I could not get online.
No explanation, no message–just no access to any of my accounts.
It turns out that I hadn’t been hacked–which is what I thought had happened, since my machine was bombarded by Trojan horses yesterday according to my firewall–instead, my provider has shut me off for trying to send 60 emails one after the other (sounds like serious spam to me).
I got through on the phone and found out from the rep in Florida that all the email accounts are monitored, and this atypical activity on mine had triggered a shut down.
Wild with relief that I had NOT been hacked, I explained that I had prepared an email with the web address of my new company and my new real-world contact info, to send to 100 or so of my nearest and dearest and put it into my Mail to be sent folder. When I instructed the system to let’er rip, wham! the system reached out to this spaminator and SHUT HER DOWN.
Now, here’s the funny part:
I get a new password from the nice lady and go back online. I have 4 emails waiting for me from AOL TOS.
–One is about Harassment (how did I get that one?)
–Another is about terms of service (okay, makes sense)
‘–Another is about sending bulk email–this one gives me pause. It says that I complained because someone was sending bulk mail from my account at high speeds and here are my rights. Uh-duh? 60 emails in a queue? That spaminator program sounds just silly and broken now.-
-And the last one? The last one pretended to be from the nice lady from Jacksonville who helped me on the phone, and talked about how nice it was to talk to me–but it was really AOL SPAM–the fitting end to a spam story.
It’s good when your mail service shuts down a spammer operating from your account, right? But how about when your service shuts you down for sending out more emails than usual? That’s what happened to me this morning with my AOL accounts–the system put a block on my account so that I could not get online.
No explanation, no message–just no access to any of my accounts.
It turns out that I hadn’t been hacked–which is what I thought had happened, since my machine was bombarded by Trojan horses yesterday according to my firewall–instead, my provider has shut me off for trying to send 60 emails one after the other (sounds like serious spam to me).
I got through on the phone and found out from the rep in Florida that all the email accounts are monitored, and this atypical activity on mine had triggered a shut down.
Wild with relief that I had NOT been hacked, I explained that I had prepared an email with the web address of my new company and my new real-world contact info, to send to 100 or so of my nearest and dearest and put it into my Mail to be sent folder. When I instructed the system to let’er rip, wham! the system reached out to this spaminator and SHUT HER DOWN.
Now, here’s the funny part:
I get a new password from the nice lady and go back online. I have 4 emails waiting for me from AOL TOS.
–One is about Harassment (how did I get that one?)
–Another is about terms of service (okay, makes sense)
‘–Another is about sending bulk email–this one gives me pause. It says that I complained because someone was sending bulk mail from my account at high speeds and here are my rights. Uh-duh? 60 emails in a queue? That spaminator program sounds just silly and broken now.-
-And the last one? The last one pretended to be from the nice lady from Jacksonville who helped me on the phone, and talked about how nice it was to talk to me–but it was really AOL SPAM–the fitting end to a spam story.