[Mailman-Users] problems with new web host and "too many complaints"

[Jonathan Dill]

Greetings,

I hope this is not too OT, hopefully someone here has had a similar 
experience and can offer some practical advice, I'm not sure what to 
tell this customer at this point.

I have a customer who has a fairly large opt-in only mailman mailing 
list (~40,000 subscribers) that they use to send out a weekly 
newsletter, people seem to primarily subscribe for the weekly contest 
for free tickets to events.  Unsubscribe links are conspicuous, and 
people who otherwise complain are unsubscribed from the list.

Recently, they moved their web hosting to a new service, and the new 
service shut down their website because they had received "too many 
complaints" about the newsletter, which mentions the website address.  I 
would have thought it would be easier to follow the unsubscribe link 
than track down the hosting company for the website, which makes me 
wonder if these "complaints" are being generated by some kind of 
antispam software.  The host forwarded a "sample" but stripped out some 
of the message headers, so all I can tell is that it really was in 
response to the newsletter.

Now the web host is talking about requiring that all of the subscribers 
be required to "opt in" again or be unsubscribed from the list--to be 
honest, that might not be a bad idea, but the customer wants to avoid this.

Has anyone else run into a situation like this and have some practical 
advice?  They have been asking me about technical ways to circumvent the 
problem, but that sounds like a really bad idea to me for several 
reasons, I don't want to be a party to that.  I'm wondering if they 
should just say to heck with this hosting company, but the customer is 
concerned that moving to yet another ISP is going to be just as painful 
a process as it was moving to this one, and I am not entirely sure that 
they wouldn't run into the same "complaint" problem with another host.

Thanks,
Jonathan