Exchange 2007 rate limiting

Question

I have devices on the network that send out email alerts for misc things. The other night there was a condition that caused one of the devices to send a few thousand emails to a couple of internal users. Thankfully it didn't take anything down but you can see how it has the potential to. All the devices connect to a receive connector on one of the transport servers. The devices don't often have a built-in limiter so I figure the best place to manage this is on the Exchange side.

Actual Question

How can I set a limit/throttle on the number of emails that can go through the connector?

Answer 1

I agree with Joe...and you simply don't have any raw performance data to go by. A few thousand 8kb emails going to internal mailboxes on the same Exchange server or a few thousand 20MB emails going to various external recipients?

The part you are probably looking for is (copy/paste from http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2007/management-administration/managing-receive-connectors-part2.html for citation):

We can also restrict the number of recipients, Rate Limit and Max message size at connector level, to configure these settings we can use the following parameters:

MaxRecipientsPerMessage: The maximum number of recipients in a single message, the default value is 200.

MaxMessageSize: The maximum size of a message; the default value is 10MB.

MaxRateLimit: This specifies the maximum number of messages that can be sent by the same client per minute.

Let’s change our Internet Receive connector to accept 100 users maximum, the message size should be more than 2MB and the rate limit is 200, as follows:

Set-ReceiveConnector<Connector Name> –MaxRecipientsPerMessage:100 –MaxMessageSize:5MB –MaxRateLimit:200