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I have a client who is using Interspire e-mail marketer to send out his e-mail messages, and this guy sends something like 100,000 e-mails per session and does this around 3-4 times per month.

He's one of my hosting clients, and I'm trying to throttle the messages he sends out, so that some ISP's (like Yahoo! for example) don't start rate limiting him and classifying him as a spammer.

His FBL e-mails come to me (abuse@), I've applied for whitelisting with most of the ISP's (AOL, Yahoo!, etc) or their FBL if they don't utilize a whitelist. I've even managed to get him listed at DNSWL.org (they wouldn't accept him at first since he had no mailing history).

I also setup a proper rDNS PTR record, setup his SPF record, and DomainKeys signature signing on all his outbound e-mail messages.

So now, I just want to know how to rate limit his outbound messages directly on the server.

I'm highly proficient with SSH and can manipulate cPanel config files if necessary.

Magellan
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Eric
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There is nothing out-of-the-box in Exim. So there is no way to do it with any control panel. It only works with a little patching and compiling Exim. So not an easy job but who said that is must be simple.

The concrete steps, the patch and mathematical figures are presented by the University of Cambridge.

Edit: Wait! It looks as if the patch was included into the main branch. So at least the patching and compiling is obsolete. You only have to configure it as described in the documentation.

mailq
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  • Wow. . .a tad-bit complicated, but nonetheless, if it's my only solution I'll have to do it. Thanks! =0) – Eric Aug 25 '11 at 16:55
  • And a little googleing revealed that it is already implemented in cPanel: http://forums.cpanel.net/f43/rate-limit-locahost-94841.html – mailq Aug 25 '11 at 17:30
  • Yeah, actually cPanel did an entire rollout for this specific problem, and plans to continue adding more options for server admins who have the same problem I encountered previously. I've since written a PHP script that interfaces with the client's mailing software (Interspire E-mail Marketing) and manually rate limits the amount of mail he can send. It runs on a cron schedule every 10 minutes, and takes into account the total number of messages he has sent within the last 60 minutes. So for now, it's *solved*, but we'll see what happens as cPanel improves their handling of this scenario. – Eric May 17 '12 at 16:02