A clients website was shut down because the url was mentioned in followup email sent out using Top Producer to contacts in the clients Top Producer database.

These Realtors had been clients for 6 years and their site was very well ranked - but the domain may be worthless now.

It seems that when someone doesn't like receiving your email they can report it to SpamCop. Since senders are often spoofed, I guess they look to see what websites are being advertised and work at shutting down those sites.

As near as I can tell, SpamCop makes their list available to the large computer datacenters who check their servers to see if any of the sites mentioned in the email are hosted with them. If they are, they notify the hosting service to shut down the site or risk having their own hosting business shut down.

It likely doesn't matter what host you use as they all probably rent servers from one of the large datacenters - so if you send out email with your website address in it (or somebody else does...) - that may be all it takes to lose years of hard work.

You can send SpamCop and other blacklisting services an email telling them it wasn't you. It can be tedious if someone spoofed your email address and domain a lot, but emails carry headers and usually the headers aren't spoofed which would help your case. The headers contain the IP address where it was sent from.

With this issue it doesn't matter who sends the email. They are attacking spam by going after the website being advertised in unwanted email - such a site is called a "spamvertised web site".

Since spam is really considered to be any email not specifically requested or authorized, the customary practice by Realtors of putting past contacts into their database and following up on a regular basis - is considered spam by some recipients.

That spam can then be reported to SpamCop - who will agree that the email is indeed spam. At that point pressure can be applied to shut down the spamvertised website. Even if the site would only be shut down for a while and put back up after appeal and a promise to never do it again, - there would be a lot of damage done.

This is probably something we will see more and more of and Realtors should be aware of the risks. Email may be cheaper but snail mail may not be dead after all.

One solution is for the site owner to self-host, or find a hosting service that is not so strident with believeing everything that comes from SpamCop.

Most realtors are still working the old way:

1. Get the visitor's email by forcing registration to search listings or for some useless "special report".

2. Force feed them useless emails until they're ready to work with you.

The new way is to write a blog. If someone likes to hear your opinion on real estate news, or your statistical market reports, they'll get a feed of your blog. It's much more efficient and less intrusive. No need to pay for email marketing software.