why is Host Rate Limited - and connection Lost

[theblake]

Email being sent to us from a university is not arriving and is not being bounced back, started a couple days ago. I use a shared CPanel hosting service for our domain and their support has not been consistent.

They tell me that the sender is not sending QUIT. But they also said Spam Asssasin is scoring them highly, however I am not confident that is correct.

They have sent me the logs, i have extracted two lines from it that reflects the issue, as the University has two different servers, there are actually two different results. and therefore two different issues.

On this first one, they will not tell me what the 1.4 is measuring, and I have no idea. It cant be limited to 1.4 emails an hour - surely.

/var/log/exim_mainlog:2010-10-27 22:33:36 H=boyes.its.utas.edu.au [144.6.1.7]:57813 I=[122.201.101.64]:25 temporarily rejected connection in "connect" ACL: "Host is ratelimited (1.4/1h max:1.2)"

This 2nd one shows that the SMTP connection is a complete failure I guess, I am not even sure how anything can be established from this.

/var/log/exim_mainlog:2010-10-27 23:07:22 SMTP connection from ironport2.its.utas.edu.au [131.217.6.12]:65112 I=[122.201.101.64]:25 lost

Every email sent from either server is consistent with that relative error as shown.

Can anyone provide some input into what is happening here. I do not have direct contact with the university mail administrator. But I would like to send him a troubleshooting report with confident details.

Happy to provide more information if necessary (not sure what i can show though)

Footnote: I can receive emails the university sents to my Gmail account so it is not a global issue for them. But emails sent to my privatedomain, hosted at same Cpanel provider but on a different machine, fail to arrive.