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"This account has been suspended."I contacted our hosting company and learned that someone had reported OpEdNEws as sending out spam.
This is the third time this has happened in the past few weeks. This time, they provided us with the "history" of the email that the complaint was based upon.
Apparently, one of our editor's newsletter subscribers had sent an email to someone who didn't like it. It looks like that person is a fundamentalist Christian who probably didn't like one of our articles (Crackpot Christianity and America's Current Moral Degeneration . His page on a website suggests he might have been offended by a recent article we published on fundamentalists and the rapture. Here's an excerpt from his website:
Tell the brethren to "Remember the teachings of our Lord. Turn away from those sinful things that are done in the dark. See? The Lord is coming soon and He will reward ALL for the deeds they have done. Don't let Him find you sleeping! Get your house in order and be ready for His arrival. Don't be a wicked servant and do the things that are wrong because you do not believe that He will come soon. Stay the course. Keep the faith."He forwarded our email newsletter on to a site that states on its home page that it wages WEB WAR on liberals. Here's the exact wording, right on that site's home page:
Remember, God is more concerned with matters ofyour soul than what He is with your pocketbook. Stay awake saints! Don't faint! It's almost over, just hold on a little longer! Seek God in prayer and His word. Avoid those things that make you fall into sin and keep your eyes on the prize. But above all things, love God and your brethren. And read His Word FOR YOURSELVES. Don't wait for Sunday/Saturday to come around so that you can learn from someone else. The Lord says, "My people perish for lack of knowledge".
Wage Web Warfare Against The Liberal Establishment!It appears that the owner of that site made a malicious spam report to a site that is used by our web hosting company to identify spammers. Once that site reported us as sending out spam, we were shut down.
This is the use of spam-reporting to repress our first amendment rights. We are going through the usual procedures of appeal to deal with this current situation. But since it is the second or third time we've had some aspect of our service interfered with because of these malicious spam reports we are looking at taking this very seriously. We are not disclosing the names or websites of the people who have caused us this problem because we don't want to help them or give them the pleasure of seeing their efforts produce hardship for us. We ARE pursuing them back channel.
OpEdNews operates as an ethical member of the internet community. We only send emails who double opt in to our mailing lists. That means that we only send to people who sign up for our mailing lists and then confirm their sign-up by responding to a confirming email we send them.
Stay tuned. We'll be providing updates on this and, if we don't feel we're being treated fairly, we'll let you know more about the players.
Rob Kall
