Help with Contabo's crazy TOS change for VPS

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Posted by nicmo, 09-17-2016, 06:06 PM
I have a VPS with cpanel at contabo and lately i have been noticing some of my clients are having troubles sending email using our VPS. We noticed several "Connection Refused". I searched alot and ended up trying to figure out the problem with Cpanel's support team. After beating our heads i ended up talking with Contabo, asking if this could be a network problem, so they replied this: I dont send spam, we are not blacklisted anywhere. Contabo decided to punish all their VPS clients for something others do and did this without any notice. I find these kind of decisions to be very poor and a good indication of the kind of people the responsible people from this company are. This is so strange because i guess most of their VPS costumers host websites, most send emails so i guess there will be alot of troubles people... Can you help? The problem we are seeing is for example when a client uses outlook to send ther emails in batches of 3 or more emails, only the first gets delivered the rest is refused because i guess Outlook is sending multiple emails per smtp connection. Is it possible to setup the server in a way that it gets all the emails and then only sends them in batches of 1 email per connection? If not i guess i will have to migrate
Posted by WPCYCLE, 09-17-2016, 08:59 PM
Long story short...migrate.
Posted by net, 09-17-2016, 09:24 PM
Sending 3 emails is very few even 50 emails. I guess you get what you paid for :-)
Posted by vps_newbie, 09-18-2016, 09:05 AM
It sounds like Contabo makes it easy to launch a DoS attack on its customers - all it takes is a few spam complaints. :-o
Posted by zoid, 09-18-2016, 09:44 AM
A few things are not clear to me. Does this apply to incoming SMTP connections or to outgoing or to both (they way you put it, it seems at least incoming)? Is this just in their terms or actually enforced? If so, how? Maybe @contabo-K can comment on that?
Posted by nicmo, 09-18-2016, 03:37 PM
seems to be only outgoing, not certain. Its enforced for sure, dont know how.
Posted by zoid, 09-18-2016, 04:00 PM
In that case why the reference to Outlook? That would be incoming only. So you cannot open more than one TCP connection on port 25?
Posted by nicmo, 09-18-2016, 04:11 PM
The outlook reference is an example where our clients get their emails blocked since many times they send emails in small batches. They dont see any warnings tho, i dont know why but "Connection Refused" errors are silent, only i can see those on the logs and cpanel. Luckly exim tries to resend those failed emails and eventually they do get send.
Posted by Mike_A, 09-18-2016, 04:15 PM
Sounds bad, but honestly, I would never consider running a mail server on a company like Contabo and you shouldn't either. Just look at their ridiculous pricing? 6.99 euro 6GB RAM 500GB SSD-Accelerated 100Mbps Unlimited
Posted by zoid, 09-18-2016, 04:37 PM
Where do you get those errors? Not on the client side with Outlook I assume. Can you tweak your outgoing mail queue to send them one-by-one?
Posted by Maple-Hosting, 09-19-2016, 03:13 PM
When you're promised a BMW with wings for $10 - something is up. Or in the more familiar version: when something seems too good to be true, many times it is.
Posted by DanielP, 09-19-2016, 03:37 PM
I'd say since they are in the budget brand this isn't unreasonable, at least they are attempting to do something to help cut the flow of spam.
Posted by Gabriel-ZetServers, 09-19-2016, 03:57 PM
Their actions are more than normal for a 7 EUR Virtual Machine. Just put yourself in their place. Spammers are hunting for very low cost servers to run their campaigns and most probably Contabo had many complaints.
Posted by SenseiSteve, 09-19-2016, 06:24 PM
Crazy TOS change? It's their company and their policy, and they're willing to take the risk of losing clients over this. Unfortunately, for you, this may mean migrating elsewhere. The best to you, sir, in coming up with a solution.
Posted by nicmo, 09-20-2016, 06:51 AM
Yeah i find it crazy, i have been with them for over 2 years and this silent change to ALL costumers breaks the deal, for 2 years i dont send spam, why do i get penalized. Thats what i am complaining and since they dont announce or write this anywhere, its a good ideia to warn others.
Posted by Tech-Hosts Team, 09-20-2016, 08:04 AM
Looks like they've had tons of issues with spam and decided to go down that route. Redstation in the UK did something similar where you had to pay extra to use the SMTP gateway to send email (in an attempt to stop spam). I'd recommend jumping ship and going to a new provider.
Posted by zoid, 09-20-2016, 08:50 AM
Well, I am still wondering where you encounter the errors. As I wrote before it cant be on Outlook's side. Also, have you tried tweaking the mail queue? It is unfortunate that they did not comment on it. Their terms do not mention anything like however.
Posted by vps_newbie, 09-20-2016, 09:29 AM
That isn't 100% fair or reasonable. Yes, it is their company and their policy, but changing the rules after the customer pays under the old rules isn't fair to the customers, even if the ToS says "Subject to arbitrary change at any time without customer consent or notification" or the equivalent. Those kind of policies give carte blanche to the providers. The customers have little choice, because those terms are nearly ubiquitous in all service-based industries. Failing to notify customers of significant changes to the ToS is sneaky and underhanded at best, dishonest at worst.
Posted by Gabriel-ZetServers, 09-21-2016, 03:22 PM
They should notify the clients about this major change in their network. Did you pay in advance for a longer period? If yes, I would contact them saying that at the moment when signing up, I had agreed with the TOS in effect at that moment. However, they could have in their TOS something like "We can change this TOS anytime without prior notification".
Posted by Nnyan, 09-21-2016, 05:37 PM
I really didn't want to spend time looking to see if there was any evidence that they had notified their customers about the change. It's more then a bit shady to make any changes to the TOS/UAP without notifying users and giving them a decent amount of notice. Having said that putting limits like this is not unexpected especially for the really low budget space they are playing in. That is within a hosts rights and reasonable. I disagree with vps_noobie, you as a customer have PLENTY of options. There are a multitude of hosts out there that do no have these types of limits, BUT just about EVERY host has some limit or another.
Posted by SenseiSteve, 09-21-2016, 05:43 PM
I can tell you I've received plenty of notices over the years that privacy policies were changed, but I've never received any notices about Terms of Service being updated or revised - from any industry.
Posted by Gabriel-ZetServers, 09-21-2016, 08:59 PM
@SenseiSteve: That's exactly because of the paragraph "We can change this TOS anytime without prior notification", which is present in almost all TOS.

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