Today I terminated a customer for what looks on the surface like a borderline offense. They used an email warmup service. That’s it, on paper. No mass-spamming, no fraud, no abuse complaints rolling in. Just a tool that helps you make a new sending domain look more credible than it actually is, which is something they specifically agreed not to use when they signed up.
If you’ve never run a shared email host, that probably reads as harsh. Warning territory at best. And honestly, that was my position for years.
The problem is, I keep watching the same pattern. Warmup service plus a specific stack of other indicators (which I’m not going to enumerate here, because I’d rather not teach the next round of spammers how to dress themselves up) has, in the entire history of MXroute, resulted in unsolicited bulk email every single time the customer was given the runway to do it. Not most of the time. Every time. I spent years denying the strength of the pattern because it felt unfair to act on something that wasn’t, by itself, a clear-cut violation. The pattern proved itself out anyway, repeatedly, across a long enough timeframe that continuing to give it the benefit of the doubt was no longer caution. It was negligence toward the rest of my customers.
Here is the thing people miss when they hear “your account has been terminated”: the customers we serve well are the customers we serve at all. Every spammer who gets a runway on MXroute is paid for by the deliverability of every legitimate customer sharing infrastructure with them. Every cold outreach campaign that goes out from one of our IPs costs the rest of the user base in the form of degraded reputation, slower delivery, and more filtering. There is no scenario where we ignore an emerging spam pattern and the rest of our customers don’t pick up the bill.
So when I terminate someone over what reads as a thin offense, the question isn’t whether the offense alone justified termination. The question is whether keeping the account justified the cost to everyone else. Once a pattern has hit 100% correlation with downstream abuse, the answer is no.
The customer was refunded in full. Not because I owe it to them, but because terminating an account isn’t an act of spite or a money grab. It’s a quality control mechanism. Refunding signals what the action actually is: I made a business decision about who belongs on the platform, and I’m not interested in being paid for the part of the relationship I’m not going to honor.
Protecting service quality for everyone we serve is the precise reason we terminate anyone, ever. If the bar were lower than that, I wouldn’t bother. There would be too many other things to argue about.