Bandwidth exceeders can still use unlimited transfer by email

[stormy]

I contacted cPanel about a strange case. A customer with 3 GB of bandwidth had used 20 GB, mostly via email (sending PDF attachments).

The website was suspended when bandwidth usage reached the limit, but email remained operational. The suspension only affects their website.

After a few cPanel techs looked into it, the latest reply is "email will still function as normal unless they try and access webmail, this seems to be designed behavior. "

Do you think it's acceptable to allow unlimited email usage to an account that has been suspended for exceeding the allowed monthly transfer? I think this qualifies as a bug and not as a "feature".

[Infopro]

I think if that email is the only way to contact the user, yes it should be left to work properly. Once he's gone over the resource limits for his account I would expect him to contact me to increase his resources, or move him to a larger account, right away.

IMHO, that user didn't send 17 GB of .pdfs overnight. If he did he's spamming or worse and knows what hes doing. I'd want to see one of those pdfs if it was one of my users before I upgraded his accounts resources.

If he kept sending the emails and not replying to my email about the issue, I would do a simple password change of his email account to get his attention.

He'll then need to find another email address to contact me.

Whether this is a bug or not I'll leave up to cPanel to sort out, but I'm quite sure I'd have noticed this user long before he sent out 17 GB of emails and taken action myself.

My 2

[stormy]

Well, the user is not a spammer, he's just a very inexperienced user. He created a magazine in PDF and emailed it to his legit and numerous customers. The PDF was 20MB. It sat in the queue for a couple days towards the end of the month and generated almost 20 GB of transfer.

He's always been in touch. He knew his site was offline until next month, in fact that was one of the reasons for him to send the PDF, as he explained after I noticed the situation.

All I'm saying is that right now, for cPanel users, email bandwidth is unlimited and free. Any customer could get the cheapest plan, not upload a website, and send emails with big attachments as much as they please, with no cost to themselves. It doesn't make much sense.

[cpanelkenneth]

The feature that suspends accounts that exceed their bandwidth limit is designed to only prevent excessive use of Apache bandwidth. From that aspect it works as designed.

The description of this feature in Tweak Settings (and possibly our documentation, though I haven't checked) was not clear on that design scope. In 11.25.1 we clarified that setting to denote only Apache bandwidth is limited.

It does seem a bit odd though that only the Apache usage is prevented after exceeding the bandwidth limit, but the consumption could be done by any number of other protocols.

[stormy]

Thanks for the clarification. Also, as far as I can see, bandwidth consumption via email will trigger the Apache suspension. This means that as long as a customer doesn't mind not having a webpage up, he has unlimited, free FTP and email transfer.

In fact I suspect that a user could setup his account with a redirection to another webpage and use email and FTP to send and receive unlimited files.

cPanel does have an account suspension script. Would it be too hard to use it for bandwidth exceeders too? It could be another Tweak Settings option.

Update - I've taken a look at last month's bandwidth usage for all my servers, and on every server there's a handful of accounts that go well over their limit. If cPanel doens't think that this is a problem, I'm going to have to manually review and suspend bandwidth exceeders. Not great.

[Infopro]

Suspending for going over bandwidth might be a bit harsh sounding but that would solve this issue of still having FTP access and sending email. (Which I've just tested myself and found to be true)


BTW, and this is just me, but years ago I would have users running out of bandwidth often. It wasn't their sites that was the problem, is was me being cheap on the transfer alloted to each inexpensive account. I've always had plenty to spare each month but held back too much on my packages/users. Increasing all packages specs made my customers happy and got rid of the issues of users sites going down for this sort of thing.

[Infopro]

Please Note: Important cPanel/WHM Version Number Designation Change

As of July 28, 2010 the cPanel/WHM version number designations have been officially changed.

Version 11.25.1 is now designated 11.28 and version 11.25.2 is now designated 11.30.

These new changes were explained in some detail recently at the July 2010 - Quarterly Road map - Webinar direct from cPanel's PodCast Studio in Houston, Texas with speakers David Grega and Mario Rodriguez.

An official press release about these changes is forthcoming and can be accessed at this link as soon as it's made available to the Forum Team:
Important cPanel/WHM Version Number Designation Change (To be updated)

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