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Huge amount of emails

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Huge amount of emails
Hi

I have about 3500 users, and have had lots of problems with Gossamer Mail and the server. The problem arises when inactive accounts are deleted. The server (because of the mail que) drowns in mailque and exim is not able to take the que away in a nice manner. I have had load on 200 (!). At one time I disabled bounce, and 40 000 mails was inserted into Email - > InBox in the admin area.

Please, anyone know what to do ? Is there any reason to upgrade the server, or should I just cancel my mailservice ? HELP!

Regards,
Are Haugsdal
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Re: [areh] Huge amount of emails In reply to
Hi Are,

Sorry about the late reply!

There are a couple things you can do. The best solution for large volumes of spam going to inactive accounts is to setup the incoming mail server to only accept email for valid Gossamer Mail accounts. We have a patch to qmail-smtpd for this, but not one for exim.

If you are interested, contact me via pm or email and I can give you a quote about installing qmail with the patch. The advantadge to this is that it will stop mail from even going into the mail queue and put the burden of bouncing the spam on whoever is sending it.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Huge amount of emails In reply to
I am using Cpanelīs solution that includes exim install and updates (and exim is updated each time cpanel has changes). Exim is so attached to the panel, that I donīt think I have the option to change to qmail unfortunatly. Any plans to port the code to exim also ? In theory, it doesnīt sound to difficult to do that check, but you would of course need to know exim. I have only half a year with practice in perl (not so much modules), so I donīt think I have the skills to do it myself.
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Re: [areh] Huge amount of emails In reply to
Hi,

I'll have a quick look at exim and see how modular it is..

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [areh] Huge amount of emails In reply to
What version of Exim are you using?

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Huge amount of emails In reply to
Until yeasterday, I used 3. But Cpanelīs latest addition included upgrade to 4, so now I use that version.
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Re: [areh] Huge amount of emails In reply to
Hi,

Looks promising. Can you ask your ISP, or Cpanel, if they suport local-scan feature of Exim described here:

http://www.exim.org/.../spec_38.html#CHAP38

If they do, it would be pretty easy to create a quick c program that would check all incoming mail and reject it if it's not a valid gossamer mail account (don't even let the mail onto the system, let whoever is sending it handle bouncing it back).

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Huge amount of emails In reply to
I have sent a request to Cpanel now. The program should also consider that there is emailaccounts outside GT Mail (all those not-fetchall), so it doesnīt delete those mails also. But you might only check those to the fetch-all account maybe..
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Re: [areh] Huge amount of emails In reply to
Answer from CPanel support: "That feature requires your filter to be compiled into exim, and since cPanel uses a pre-compiled RPM, this is impossible."
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Re: [areh] Huge amount of emails In reply to
Hmm, how many Gossamer Mail users do you have? If it's a pay site and not that many, then you might be able to list them all out in your exim config and use an ACL as described here:

http://www.exim.org/.../spec_37.html#CHAP37

If it's a lot of users, then I don't think that would be a good idea.

Not sure what else to suggest except a separate server to handle the mail where you can put your own mail server on it.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.