I'm starting a free webhost rather soon and am concerned about spam. Whilst I believe I am legally quite well covered (see here), I'm sure there's more I can do.

What advice would you give to a host?

Bear in mind it's not possible to human-review all free accounts in real-time, and that I will also provide paid packages.

All suggestions appreciated!

ban all accounts found guilty of spamming.....

Yes, of course - but I had precautions more in mind...

It's hard with a free hosting service becuase the users could use any information they want. With paid, at least you have credit card details and if things don't match up right, then you can cancel the order.

Just make sure you keep an eye on everything that happens on your server. Monitor for anything suspiscious that's been uploaded.

Hmm, it is indeed difficult for a free hosting services. I think the most reasonable thing to do for the free package is to limit email capabilities quite significantly, and on higher paid ones allow the usual.

dont offer mass-emailing for the free one

Most free hosts have mail () disabled.

* Make sure you limit the number of recipients in SMTP settings.
* Make sure you dont have open relay.
* Keep an eye on bad mail folder. You will see many undeliverable mails in bad mail folder in case of a spam action. If you open and checkout the undelivered email you can find clues on who's the actual spammer so that you can ban his account.
* Do not allow customers use mailing lists on your server. Advice them to send mass mailing through their computers, not through your server.

Otherwise many internet servers will blacklist your server and your credibility will drop to zero as none of your customers send emails to many domains as many admins use dns-blacklisting nowadays.

HMarker, thanks for the advice there - that's exactly the sort of stuff I wanted to know.

I'm a bit of a rookie with server config, so I'll take a look into the above. Do you know of any sort of script/WHM addon I could use to stop spam slightly more... automatically?