> I can't see on what grounds you could get sued for? If you > supply a service which hasnt been paid for and you keep and > refuse to forward mail, then they couldn't sue you for it.
As I said, if you do anything except bounce it, like allow the email to your server and basically hold it hostage, you could be sued. The case in the news involved an ISP that did that and someone missed a job offer. If the email had bounced maybe the sender would have used some other method of contact. I believe California passed a law requiring 30 days notice. -- Dan Kriwitsky
I believe Dan to be very correct, you can shut them down so email is bounced, you cannot accept the mail and not give it to them. Email is getting more and more like postal mail, a landlord can't give you your mail because you didn't pay your rent.
Our web site was held hostage years ago, we had a host company that had horrible service, slow lines, no support, so we put in with NSI to move the site. Since this company was listed as the tech contact, they got the message about the move and NACKED it, and shut us down. We didn't know better at the time and our domain registrations were done with our domain name's email address, not an outside address like we now do. So we could not reply and ACK the change, and we couldn't email NSI from our address to put the request in again. It took many phone calls and faxes.
We got the attention of Senator Jeffords from Vermont who wrote to the FCC on our behalf. The FCC wrote nasty letters to this company, who basically said screw you. And our bills were paid. In 1995 when this happened, there was little Internet protection against fraud of this nature, I believe much has changed since then.
ADVICE: be sure all of your domain registrations use an email address other than your real domains. Of course like us, most of you host your own domains so this isn't much of an issue, but it probably still does not hurt. If anything ever happens with your own domain name, you can still act upon it and get changes/fixes made by using an email address from your ISP, or even a Yahoo address (maybe the only good reason to have one of these addresses).
Regards, JalePS: BTW, we tried to get Senator Bernie Sanders to help us and got no reply. We dropped a letter address to Sanders at Jeffords office, pretty funny handing Jeffords a letter addressed to his competitor. And he did something about it, that was very cool of him.