Linux – Protecting Exim queue from spammers and hogging system resources

emaileximlinux

Is there a way to protect Exim from spammers? Today had someone sign up and spam the queue with a bunch of e-mails. I run CPanel and have it so Exim only allows so many per hour but the system hit a load of 4.0 from the queue being hit hard and loaded up to about 50k emails.

Is there a way to keep an account from loading the queue so high or in some way to better protect Exim from spammers?

Best Answer

Have you checked out this option:

Percentage of email messages to queue and retry for delivery

This configuration option allows you to define how overages are handled when a domain exceeds the maximum number of emails allowed per hour. By default, additional messages are queued for delivery and sent in the next hour. This option is only available to the root user and to resellers that have root privileges. The configuration data for this option is stored in /var/cpanel/cpanel.config.

The value you configure here is compared against the value set in Max hourly emails to determine whether an outgoing message should be queued and resent later or discarded. For example, if you set this value to 125%, then once the domain reaches its hourly limit, Exim will queue any additional messages, up to 125% of the Max hourly emails value. Once the account reaches 125% of the Max hourly emails value, any additional outgoing messages are discarded.

You may use this feature to discard all outgoing messages once the domain has reached its limit by setting the The percentage of email messages (above the account’s hourly maximum) to queue and retry for delivery value to 100.

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