Mail Abuse: Tools for managing SMTP alerts and suspensions on cPanel

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What is Mail Abuse?

Mail Abuse is an internal tool developed and maintained by LWS that allows customers to view and take action on reports filed against LWS.

When a spam complaint is received about you or when SPAM is detected, and we can confirm that it is valid, we suspend the outgoing SMTP email service for your cPanel account and all associated domains and subdomains.

How do you know if your SMTP service has been suspended?

As soon as we suspend the SMTP service for your account, an email is sent to the email address of the customer account. However, you can view the status from your cPanel account by clicking on the"Email Abuse" icon.

What should I do if my SMTP service has been suspended?

A suspension of your SMTP service indicates that your cPanel account has been found to be sending SPAM. You can check your sending history from the "Track delivery" icon:

You should then check the emails sent by your cPanel account, whether sent by your website (with the mail() PHP function or with an SMTP connection) or by your email inboxes and ensure that these problematic sendings are no longer present on your account. The most frequent cases are :

• Website :
  • Using the contact form to send spam to the administrator: some robots use your contact form to send spam to the site owner. You can block these robots by improving your LWS Protect settings, adding a layer of protection such as Cloudflare, or adding anti-robot protection to your form. Internal submissions (to a mailbox in your cPanel account) are more controlled than external submissions, so if you don't have an immediate solution to the problem, we recommend that you only send your contact forms to internal mailboxes to avoid a second block.
  • Misuse of the "Send me a copy" function on a contact form: some robots can use the "Send me a copy" function on a contact form to send SPAM to others: all you have to do is fill in someone else's email box and your site becomes a spam relay. In this case, we advise you to remove this functionality.
  • Infected/hacked website: certain types of infection/hacking are designed simply to make your website a spam relay. You can use the ImunifyAV tool on cPanel to carry out an antivirus scan. The LWS Protect tool will help you improve the security of your website.
• Email boxes:
  • The email client is a known host (corresponds to the IP address of your office, for example). This indicates that the device and/or network is corrupted by malware, a virus or has been hacked. In this type of case, you need to run an antivirus and update your system.
  • The email client is an unknown host: this indicates that someone has the password to your email inbox. You will need to replace it. Also make sure that there is no malicious software on your devices (computer, tablet, phone) that could recover the new password and repeat the problem.

As a general rule, contact your webmaster or IT manager if you do not recognise certain transmissions made via your cPanel account. Our support team can also advise or help you.

How do I lift the suspension of the SMTP service on my cPanel account?

You can reactivate your outgoing mailings when you have resolved the problem, and the time limit for complaints to expire has passed.

Please note

You should only ask for the suspension to be lifted when you are 100% sure that you have found the cause and taken the necessary action. You are hosted on a shared server, you share the SMTP service and we have undertaken not to relay SPAM on the Internet. In order to guarantee a quality of service, and an optimal reputation for our SMTP servers, only one unblocking is authorised every 90 days.

You have requested suspension and you are suspended again? If it has been less than 90 days since the first SMTP unblocking request, then you can no longer request an unblocking and the outgoing SMTP mail service will remain blocked on this cPanel account.

If you absolutely need an email sending service with your account, the only solution is to switch to a VPS server type service which includes a dedicated, fixed IPv4 address. This allows you to have your own SMTP sending server.

Be aware that if you continue to send spam, even with a VPS server, there is a very good chance that your emails will no longer reach your recipients. Services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook ... may block you and/or blacklist your SMTP server and domains.