Email hosting question

[same_sky]

I came home today to an email from my hosting company, advising me that one of my domains is receiving close to one million emails per day lately, and has caused problems with the email system over several days and crashed the entire server at some point. As a result, they have disabled email to the entire domain. Pertinently, these one million emails are being sent to completely made-up accounts. I chose not to redirect the "catchall" email long ago due to an excessive amount of spam (but nowhere near that many!) I have no idea what caused this but it's pretty obvious to anyone, I would think, that I am not actively soliciting one million emails a day on purpose. (Basic math says that if I am doing nothing but reading emails for eighteen hours a day, I would still need to read 926 per minute just to keep up.) Besides that, they should have access to my account to see a) what email address I have set up and b) what email addresses are being used.

They suggest that I buy or lease a "decent dedicated server" or buy another domain name. Or use gmail. (Seriously, they said that. Gmail. Which, gmail is fine but I have been PAYING THEM FOR EMAIL for over three years now.) I understand, really I do, that I am not their only customer. However, they mentioned words like "lately" and "investigations" and "we have tried various methods", which indicates that they've known about the problem for at least some time, but didn't give me the slightest warning that there was a problem until they sent an email saying that they had disabled all email.

This email account, btw, is the oldest one M and I have open. We're not using it that much for new correspondence but we have kept the accounts open so that people who have that address will be able to stay in contact--it gets a fair amount of spam (NOT a million, though!) However, as of today, any email we've gotten to this domain will bounce. No warning, no nothing. As a matter of fact, I used that email address just today to sign up for something and I bet that's going to get screwed up now.

Is this a reasonable thing for them to do? Considering that the volume of email is so, so not my fault? kapuhi? What do you think? What should they do? What should I do?

Because... even though I'm trying to be understanding, I can't help but be a little annoyed over here. On the other hand, I really don't want to get mad at them and leave because the thought of trying to move Mosaic Minds (they host five domains for me) gives me the heebie jeebies. ;) On the other hand.. they don't thrill me in other ways, either, so I don't know. Decisions, decisions.

Edited to add: I should have checked this before I sent them a reply this afternoon, but... they have actually disabled the entire site, which certainly wasn't mentioned in the email at all. The connection is closed as soon as you attempt it. Great.

Comments

[lizardek.livejournal.com]

please tell me this isn't 1and1.com?

[same-sky.livejournal.com]

No, it's a company called Hummingbird Hosting. :) You're safe!

p.s. Did 1&1 ever start charging you? I'm pretty sure that it was Jan or so of 2003 when I signed up with them, so I expected them to start looking for money in 2006, but they didn't.