It’s thursday and little did i know that my worst fear would come true. 11.30 AM, our Administrator notified me of Hostcats.com domain being suspended by godaddy and I was shocked to say the least. I called up godaddy support and the support tech recommended me to email abuse. I emailed abuse and then searched my mailbox for any notifications and found one email sent 45 mins ago of the suspension notice without an explanation.
I could find the Abuse Department hotline in the notification mail and immediately called them up. First try, phone leads to voicemail, second try and someone lifts the phone in the abuse department. Having found someone to speak in abuse department, i started explaining him the situation and he promised to let me know the reason for suspension in about 15 minutes via email. Meanwhile, i was still in a state of shock wondering the reason for suspension.
After about 15-20 minutes, i did receive the email from godaddy with complete details for the reason of suspension. It all started when a semi-crack client thought of emailing all his contacts with his latest website update. Unfortunately, sales@hostcats.com and abuse@godaddy.com were part of his contact list.
What triggered the suspension is that, our helpdesk responded an automatic reply to all the email ids including abuse@godaddy.com. One of the hosting vendors in the email contact list replied back to all the email ids again resulting in another auto reply from us to all the Ids.
Godaddy considered our helpdesk auto response as spamming and suspended our domain. Abuse department finally were convinced with my explanation and unsuspended the domain within 2 hours of suspension. The damage was already done and DNS with the suspended nameservers of godaddy were already propagated globally resulting in 24-48 hours inaccesibility to our website. We did disable the option of emailing CC email ids from our helpdesk.