Web hosting provider Dreamhost recently announced in its March company newsletter that it will stop providing mail-filtering tool Procmail to its users, leaving a few customers upset with the hosting provider’s decision to cut one of its services after offering it for years.

Procmail is a program for filtering electronic mail and is useful for presorting and preprocessing large amounts of incoming mail. It is used to sort out mail from mailing lists, to dispose of junk mail, to send automatic replies or to run a mailing list.

It isn’t unprecedented for a hosting provider to stop offering a service it has offered in the past, especially when it is explaining to customers that it will be replacing it with its own in-house filtering mechanism and that it is grandfathering the service for existing accounts. But browsing the Dreamhost discussion board, it seems as though some customers are offended by the way Dreamhost decided to halt the service without a proper 30 to 60 day notice of a change.

One forum user shared the response he received from the hosting provider after sending in a support ticket regarding the Procmail announcement.

Dreamhost wrote: “The plan is to make the Keyword Filter section of our panel more robust so (sic) mimic many common procmail jobs. Regretfully there won’t be any direct access for users to create and maintain your own procmail. We understand that this is a bit of a step backwards as far as our long known open access, but it’s a bit of a necessary evil if we are going to proceed with a new paradigm to allow for more reliable mail.”

Dreamhost’s methods of dealing with customer issues have been both praised and criticized in the past, which explains why some customers are accepting and supportive of Dreamhost’s Procmail decision while others don’t appear to be taking as kindly to the change.

After an outage in 2005, Dreamhost published a very public and detailed account of the problems in its blog, which was met with a widespread and mostly positive response from customers. But earlier this year in January, Dreamhost was heavily criticized for the informal, and as some described it, condescending, way it dealt with an issue where the company accidentally over-billed its customers for approximately $7.5 million.