SMTP relay limit reached

[pmars]

Can I use SpamAssassin to stop spam email from causing my email server to be shut down? GoDaddy sends me an email every morning at 3:00 a.m. stating I have sent 1000 emails! (NOT!!)

Only problem is I do not have SpamAssassin. It is greyed out on my Plesk 8.6

Also, It was recommended by a GoDaddy person that I select "Discard" in my email settings... I cannot find it!

Wish I could this figured out... I cannot send emails until the SMTP limit is resolved

thanks for any help!

 

[breun]

Can I use SpamAssassin to stop spam email from causing my email server to be shut down? GoDaddy sends me an email every morning at 3:00 a.m. stating I have sent 1000 emails! (NOT!!)

Only problem is I do not have SpamAssassin. It is greyed out on my Plesk 8.6

You'll need to buy a license to be able to use Plesk's SpamAssassin plugin or you could install qmail-scanner from the Atomic Rocket Turtle repository to be able to use SpamAssassin (without a GUI at the moment). However, if people are sending spam through your server, then you want to stop the problem at the origin.

Also, It was recommended by a GoDaddy person that I select "Discard" in my email settings... I cannot find it!

I think they might be referring to the 'reject' option: Domains > [domain] > Mail > Preferences > Reject. Spammers sometimes just send their junk to random addresses on a domain. When you set the preference for mail to non-existent mailboxes to 'reject' those e-mails are silently dropped by your mailserver. If you don't have it set to reject your mailserver sends a failure notice to the from address of the original spam message. Often this address is not the address of the spammer, but a non-existent address or the address of an innocent third party. In that case your server is sending out so called backscatter spam. By setting the option to reject at least you're not sending out backscatter.

However, setting the option to reject also means that people that meant to send you a letigimate message, but made an error in typing your address won't receive a message telling them that their message could not be delivered.

 

[pmars]

Seems to be working

During this whole fiasco, I discovered that I had 3,395 emails in my servers "mail queue". I deleted them and now everything seems to be working OK. I checked the queue this morning and it's still empty.

I have all domains set to "reject" unknown recipients. Hopefully this will continue to work.

Thanks