Careful with a mail - can't stress it enough.. also give a hand if you can.

Steerpike posted earlier about being careful with transferring gold between accounts.  He also mentioned that several Guild leaders have been suspended for mailing their guild. I've first hand experience with this.

I'm the guild leader of the Tuatha member guild Relic. After the ClubGaiscioch in AvA last night I sent out a mail to the guys about the event and about registering on Gaiscioch for future events.. I also asked the guys to send me any screenshots they might have taken via facebook so that we could post them on our imgur gallery.

After I sent my mail I got kicked from the game and couldn't log in. I contacted customer support and they sent me this 

Greetings!

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online Team.

We're sorry to inform you that your account has been permanently deactivated for violating the Terms of Service of The Elder Scrolls Online. You will no longer have access to the game or forums. If you feel that this action has been taken in error, you are welcome to contact us at ESO_help@elderscrollsonline.com.

Thank you for your continued interest and support!

Warm Regards,
Joao B.
The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Of course I replied and said that of course I'd like an appeal.  I forwarded him the mail that I sent out so that they could see it wasn't spam... but really, I just don't understand. Guild leaders sending mail to their guild is a normal thing in all mmos. I have always sent mail to my members... and now this..  I have spent the last four hours on hold with customer support.. I've gotten disconnected once and not spoken to any person. It has not been a good weekend.

Lesson here? Don't send mail. Do not send gold. Do not go afk in any dungeon. Do not do anything in this game that could be misconstrued into something it's not... no really.. I don't have a lesson. We should be able to send mail, send gold and go afk. My heart is heavy and I'm really bummed about this.

Here is a thread I made in the customer support forums if you want to show some support there (EDIT just no petitions that might get me in more trouble):

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/76378/suspended-for-mailing-guild

but really just.. I dunno. be careful in everything. I wouldnt' even send items to other players until they figure out what they are doing with the mail system.

Honestly, I would rather deal with the minor annoyance of deleting gold spam emails than have anyone banned for a legitimate activity. People always complain about gold sellers, but this is so much worse.

That's horrible... I hope they get this resolved and get you back into the game ASAP.

Gold sellers are a side effect of a world within a world.  If your currency is worth something, someone might trade their own currency for it.  I'm sure they are just trying to make the economy safeguarded, not to mention any hotspots where mobs are, but they should have more sophisticated methods of detecting gold selling than, "Ooo, he e-mailed gold to him.  Bye bye."  It's not like this started yesterday.

Maybe they can reach out to the NSA.

jeez, that is awful... sorry you have to go through that but I cant imagine that they will continue to leave your account suspended, just keep up the e-mails and whatnot and I'm sure they will realise that their decision was made in error.

That spam filter they've implemented must have their customer support working twice as hard as before. They have reinstated my account! :)

Thanks for the kind wishes all. Still going to stay away from the mail system for a while. - M.

Good to hear you're back in the game! That sounded like a nightmare.

Yes, happy to hear you are back in the game Meagh!  How horribly frustrating.

I dunno . . .  I don't think Zenimax understands MMOs.  Good with console solo player games; but don't understand MMO communities and game mechanics.

I read on the ESO forums about a guy that decided to level a new toon; so sent his gold from his Lvl 20 over to his new alt and got perma banned.  Wow!  So innocents like him get tossed and everywhere I look now I see gold spammers and farming bots.

But the thing we need to remember is the reason the gold spammers exist is that they do have customers!  Why, I don't know.   Do you want to do business with a vendor who is doing something unethical?  Do you really want to give this unethical vendor your confidential credit card information?  I know someone that was foolish enough to do this and the next day he logged in and his inventory in GW2 was wiped clean - not even a stitch of clothing on his toon and when he reported it to ArenaNet he got perma banned.  He was just lucky they didn't hack his bank account.

Not that I'm condoning gold sellers or buyers, but there are ways to build in time sinks and money sinks that don't enable gold buyers to flourish.  To be honest, I'm a little confused on a few decisions this game made as it pertains to the game economy.  But the game is brand new so things happen.

From what I can gather in game, it appears they are short handed when it comes to CS people.  When the gold spammers appear, they can spam for a very long period of time before they're banned.  Perhaps they didn't anticipate the popularity of the launch and didn't hire enough people to grease the wheels.

I agree that I'd rather let some of the gold spammers through then negatively impact other people's gaming experience.  It really is a minor nuisance (there's an addon to filter chat spam) and it's not that much different from being annoyed by things being said in zone chat at times.

I read on the ESO forums about a guy that decided to level a new toon; so sent his gold from his Lvl 20 over to his new alt and got perma banned.

This one confuses me. You can't mail yourself - you get an error "Unable to send mail - you cannot send mail to yourself." It's always been that way as far as I'm aware. For a while in beta there was no way to exchange gold between your alts - they brought in the "deposit gold" function for account banks quite late in the development phase.  The only way I can see it happening is if he had two accounts.

You can send mail to your account by addressing the mail to @username.  Every character has access to the mail that way.

No, you can't mail yourself using your @name. I just tested to see if this has changed and it hasn't changed, you get the error message that says "You cannot send mail to yourself". Every character has access you your mail, but you can't put mail in there by mailing to your own @name.

Sorry, I got this game confused with Neverwinter lol.  My bad.

Must have had another account?

My guy and I send mats and gear to one another regularly, often many times in a single play session. Thusfar, no issues. I suspect the code running for fraud looks for the following (so would recommend avoiding them as much as human possible):

- Mass game mail (more than X players... would probably estimate this to be a ludicrously low number like 10, since small guilds are being caught by it).

- Game mail containing gold AT ALL; suspect there is actually a trigger of [gold amount => X] that is based off of internal guesses for how much gold an average Y per day player could earn but, admittedly, this is prone to trap many who play more or play the marketplace, etc than not.

- Game mail containing links; specifically links that are not Facebook; suspect they really haven't developed a "blacklist" of links and are simply allowing Facebook and auto-flagging the rest in an attempt to stop spammers linking to sites that redirect to other sites (from which they sell gold), tinyurl links, etc.

Hopefully, Zenimax will get some (obviously needed) refinement/granularity on their automated patrollers. I suspect failure to do so in the not-too-distant future will cost them players (if it isn't already).

Personally, I observe the above and, as stated, haven't had any issue sending stupid amounts of ore, heavy armor, etc to my guy (and he, sending runes, plants, and weapons to me). I do wonder if there will be flags on the rarer items or not... suppose we'll see.

I can say this - if I get hit with something like this for doing normal things that do NOT touch the above flags, candidly, my time with this game will be DONE. While I understand and appreciate their interest in stopping spammers and gold sales, I'm not willing to endure the fiascoes that others have reported on this thread.

This makes no sense. They have a mechanism in the mail system that makes it easy to report the gold spammers that contact players individually. They are taking being proactive to an extreme here. Hopefully they will adjust.