Hey guys,

today I have a very sad story to share… My Aweber Account was suspended and closed and I don’t like to say this… but your account might be at risk as well.

Here is what happened:

I’ve received a support request from one of my customers at Traffic Witch. I’ve pasted the important part of that support request below.

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Aweber doesn’t allow me to log in:

Sorry, the account you tried to access is currently unavailable from your IP because of too many requests. If you are the owner of this account, please contact help[at]aweber.com for assistance. Please reference “Web Form Throttle: trafficwitch **ip address removed**” in your support ticket.

Frankly, I’m tired of aweber. They cause too much trouble.
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I contacted the Aweber Live Support. I gave them this error message, the Traffic Witch website URL and my Aweber account login as they requested that. It took them a few minutes and then they replied to me that I was violating their Terms Of Service the way I’ve integrated the Aweber form at Traffic Witch.

Well, I told them that this is how all membershipsite scripts integrate Aweber. I haven’t seen any membershipsite script that didn’t do it that way and I’ve tested many of them.

The Aweber Support people didn’t care about other websites and gave me a deadline to remove the Aweber form from Traffic Witch. I was shocked and even speaking to a Supervisor didn’t solve the problem, they say it’s against their TOS to integrate the Aweber form in the php code and pass the subscriber data to Aweber after entering the subscriber data in the membershipsite script database first. I would have to use some kind of Email Parser to do the integration they say.

Well, I took action quickly and switched the form integration of my Traffic Witch site to another autoresponder company before the Aweber Deadline was over. Seems that this didn’t matter… they closed my account without a further warning. They didn’t even ask if I’ve removed the form.

So when I tried to login to Aweber today, this is what I saw:

So, if you are using a membershipsite script that integrates Aweber in the PHP code (and I don’t know of any that do it differently), then you might most likely be violating their TOS and your account could be suspended without any further notice. Your subscribers could be completely gone if you don’t do backups!

Normally I’d suggest you go and contact their support to make sure you are not violating their TOS… but as you can see in my example, exactly this move could get your account closed.

By the way, I’m not the only one that got his Aweber account suspended. Several fellow Traffic Exchange owners had to move to a new autoresponder company as well and some of the big names in the internet marketing industry as well, including Frank Bauer who wrote about this on his blog.

So, make sure you don’t integrate Aweber with any membershipsite script (unless you use their own email parsers)… otherwise you might either get your account suspended or you might run into the problem that your subscribers can’t click on your links due to too many IP requests (don’t ask me how too many requests can be happen, I’m speachless).

Anyways, now I’m a bit out of email business, at least for a while until I’ve imported my lists into a new autoresponder company… which is hopefully soon, so that I can contact my subscribers again. I’ll keep you updated on how I solve this problem.

Let me know what you think and post your comment below.

Guido Nussbaum