Maximum number of emails per hour - Messages or Recipients?

[sneader]

We just had a customer with an infected computer relay out 1000+ emails before we were able to stop it. This customer has the following setting under Modify Account:

Maximum Hourly Email by Domain Relayed = 100

It is true that the infected machine sent less than 100 actual emails, but each email had about 100 recipients.

So, the question is... is WHM limiting the number of messages sent, or the number of recipients? If all 100 email messages had gone out with 100 recipients, that would be 10,000 actual emails sent, even with a limit of 100.

The documentation does not make it clear to me:

WHM allows you to specify the maximum number of emails that a particular domain can send per hour. This allows you to limit spam and better regulate bandwidth that domains on your server use.​

So, either it is not counting total recipients OR there is a bug here. I do admit this server is on 11.44 LTS (due to a couple more months of FrontPage support)

- Scott

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

Please refer to the comment under the following feature request:

http://features.cpanel.net/responses/additional-email-limits-per-domain-per-day-max-in-queue

You can vote, add additional feedback, and review the information about "recipients_max" in the event you want to limit the maximum recipients per message.

Thank you.

 

[sneader]

Hi Michael. I have reviewed the comment, and am not sure it applies to my question or concern.

My question still is... is WHM limiting the number of messages sent, or the number of recipients?

If I want to limit a customer to "1000 emails per hour", and the customer sends 100 email messages, each with 100 recipients... does WHM consider that 100 emails or 10,000 emails (100 x 100 = 10,000)?

- Scott

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

A single email can have multiple recipients and be counted as 1 email towards the maximum allowed per hour. You will need to use custom recipients_max value in your Exim configuration to limit the number of recipients allowed per email.

Thank you.

 

[sneader]

Thanks for the clarification, Michael. Certainly we would not limit the number of recipients per email to anything less than the RFC standard/max of 100, as this would be a major inconvenience to many of our customers.

Sounds like maybe a feature request is in order, to see if there is a way to limit the number of emails, by counting total RECIPIENTS, per hour... I would guess every web host wants THAT, and not just a limit on the number of emails (which might contains 100 recipients). If I want to limit a customer to 1000 emails per hour... I don't really want them to be able to send 100,000 emails out in an hour (which would be allowed under the current system)

- Scott

 

[cPanelMichael]

Feel free to update this thread with the link to the feature request should you choose to open it.

Thank you.

 

[sneader]

Just waiting for it to come out of moderation.

 

[sneader]

Feature Request is now visible at: https://features.cpanel.net/topic/exim-maximum-emails-per-hour-setting-should-count-total-recipients