Email send limit

vivalafe

Verified User
Joined
Jul 17, 2005
Messages
44
Location
Santo Domingo
Hello:

I have been having problems with a cliente with more than 10,000 contacts in a mailing list. The client tries to send from 4 to 6 messages to the entire user base in the same day.
Since I could set special permission to this user with DA /etc/virtual/limit_username feature, there is, however, a shared resource concern. I am wondering now the following: How much is enough or too much for a user to send emails in a shared hosting environment and what will be a reasonable limit?
What do you think?

Thanks in advance,

Isaias
 
Hello,

We basically allow our users to send 100 messages per hour and 1000 per day. I would say it's enough for ~90% of our customers. Those who need more either use Google Apps (or other similar services) or pay extra to us for less strict limits.
 
@Isaias:

I believe you're asking more about technical limits than anything else. Since you haven't told us a thing about your server's resources, your available upstream data, how many sites you're hosting, or how many emails are going out now before you allow this, it's really impossible to answer.

Our servers can easily handle 50,000 emails a day (some can handle that many in an hour), but yours may not, and since there are many other issues to consider, we don't take this kind of request lightly.

For example:

How good is the list? How many bounces is it going to get? How good is the sender's method of handling bounces? Does the sender have a strict double-opt-in policy and a track record with no spam complaints?

Can you give him his own IP# for outgoing email (search these forums for how to do this)?

Do you either have the human or automated resources to monitor your logs and your queues?

One thing you'll need to do is switch to split spool delivery. You may want to tell exim to queue all email rather than try to deliver, and then run multiple mail queue runners with cronjobs. All this in the name of efficiency, but be careful, some recipients (AOL, for example) wil consider mail to be more likely spam if there's a lot of emails going to the same domain at one time. Some helpful ideas here (linuxconsultant.com) but you may need to modify some of these suggestions; they were written for cPanel.

Ideally, we'd like this type of client on a VPS so he doesn't impact anyone else on our shared servers, even if he has problems.

And make sure you have a strong terms of service/acceptable use policy so you can shut down his email without liability if circumstances require.

Jeff
 
Thank you, Alex! Thank you Jeff:

Both of your answers are very helpful. I was looking for your thoughts about what a good practice should be and what will be a reasonable limit.
Resources itself was not a big concern since we have plenty of bandwidth and server capacity to handle what this client is trying to do. But, since we are in a growing business we prefer to stay clear in what is fear to let a client to do without over-limiting. This particular server has a very low load, and most of the hosted sites are low trafic and a few are mid trafic. But, we think, if a client pays for a shared service should no try to use dedicated or VPS equivalent resources. That will mean less resources for other actual or future clients.
However, Jeff, you have set the discusion to an interesting direction. We are definitely revising our TOS to include this kind of situations since not all limits are contemplated or specified in the text.
Could you share how do you set (numbers) email sending limits in your servers?

Thank you!

Isaias
 
Could you share how do you set (numbers) email sending limits in your servers?
New clients get 1,000 maximum emails per day; that keeps spammers from buying hosting just to spam; 1,000 emails isn't enough for them to bother.

Once a client is known to us (a simple email, a simple phone call, whatever), we'll raise it to what the client needs, but since that's a manual procedure we can ask why the client needs the higher number and reach a conclusion as to what we want to do.

This is a recent change for us, but it appears to be right for us and our clients.

Jeff
 
I am sorry for this late reply.
Thanks Jeff and Alex for your ideas and for sharing your practices and experiences.
You have been very usefull.

Thanks,

Isaias
 
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