Email Tracking & Reporting

[jk_dc]

Hello,

I have couple cpanel servers and now looking to setup smarthost (since we are unable to proactively manage the outbound spam resulting in issues). I am now looking for suggestions and clarity on the below so we can setup the structure in the most effective manner.

1- How can i pull sent email count from SSH on per account level for lets say 1st Mar - 31st Mar, i would like to see the actual usage to estimate the load for the smarthost.

2- For all the above emails, i would like to see how many of them were delivered, rejected, frozen & subsequently removed by the admin.

3- When we setup mailchannels for e.g. is there a way to direct email traffic to them only when the email is generated from smtp and not from the PHP mail functions for example.

4- Regularly what are the restrictions in place by the web hosting companies on PHP mail?

5- When you sent hourly limit per account, it applies to SMTP and also on the PHP mails generated by that account? If yes, any emails on top of that will be frozen in the queue?

6- Is there a way / plugin that can auto suspend the account in case of the spam/high sending load from PHP mail? Since mailchannel will charge per email we need some of the ways to handle this proactively without depending on resources to do it.

Welcome all suggestions from the experts that can help streamline this - we do look at the queues on regular intervals but it takes only couple hours sometimes that huge spam is queued and the IPs are hurt.

Thanks in advance for all the help!

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello @jk_dc,

1- How can i pull sent email count from SSH on per account level for lets say 1st Mar - 31st Mar, i would like to see the actual usage to estimate the load for the smarthost.

2- For all the above emails, i would like to see how many of them were delivered, rejected, frozen & subsequently removed by the admin.

The following thread offers some information on this topic:

Wanting to count number of emails a single account sends in X time

3- When we setup mailchannels for e.g. is there a way to direct email traffic to them only when the email is generated from smtp and not from the PHP mail functions for example.

As I understand, that's already how it works by default.

4- Regularly what are the restrictions in place by the web hosting companies on PHP mail?

This isn't something we track data on, but here are some threads where the topic of restricting or blocking email from PHP scripts is discussed:

Stop sendmail spam
How to stop sendmail?
Outgoing Email Abuse from localhost

5- When you sent hourly limit per account, it applies to SMTP and also on the PHP mails generated by that account? If yes, any emails on top of that will be frozen in the queue?

Yes, as long as the emails are coming from the cPanel user they are counted. The following document explains how the email limits work, and how to configure what happens to the emails once the limit is reached:

How to Prevent Spam with Mail Limiting Features - cPanel Knowledge Base - cPanel Documentation

6- Is there a way / plugin that can auto suspend the account in case of the spam/high sending load from PHP mail? Since mailchannel will charge per email we need some of the ways to handle this proactively without depending on resources to do it.

Have you considered simply disabling the PHP "mail" function and requiring your customers to use SMTP authentication in their PHP scripts for sending emails? This would ensure the email is routed through the smart host, even if it comes from a PHP script.

Thank you.