Questions about the hourly mail limit

[casperl]

Hi,

Three questions about the hourly mail limit.

1) If mail for userabc@domainabc.com (hosted by Bluehost) is forwarded to userabc@differentmailserver.com, would each forwarded mail message also count as a sent message and be deducted from the hourly limit?

2) I have a lot of PHP forms and varies system 'bots' running in a PHP based CMS. They use the PHP mail function and generate a moderate amount of mail. Forms may send the message to three different addresses (recipient, webmaster, automated notification system). My question is whether mail sent through the PHP Mail function is also being deducted from the hourly limit. (There are probably better ways of doing this, but there are older sites that I maintain using the same workflow and automation that are still based upon a CGI/perl system and I would rather keep us much functionality common between the two platforms, thus forwarded email is the way to go here.)

3) The notification of CRON jobs are also sent by email. Are these also deducted from the hourly limit?

My observation was that none of these three factors are deducted from the hourly limit, but I would like to know this for certain.

I could post these questions to Bluehost support (who are busy enough as it is), but members of the forum may know the answers offhand.

Any advice will be appreciated.

Casper

[rando]

Hi,

Three questions about the hourly mail limit.

1) If mail for userabc@domainabc.com (hosted by Bluehost) is forwarded to userabc@differentmailserver.com, would each forwarded mail message also count as a sent message and be deducted from the hourly limit?

2) I have a lot of PHP forms and varies system 'bots' running in a PHP based CMS. They use the PHP mail function and generate a moderate amount of mail. Forms may send the message to three different addresses (recipient, webmaster, automated notification system). My question is whether mail sent through the PHP Mail function is also being deducted from the hourly limit. (There are probably better ways of doing this, but there are older sites that I maintain using the same workflow and automation that are still based upon a CGI/perl system and I would rather keep us much functionality common between the two platforms, thus forwarded email is the way to go here.)

3) The notification of CRON jobs are also sent by email. Are these also deducted from the hourly limit?

My observation was that none of these three factors are deducted from the hourly limit, but I would like to know this for certain.

I could post these questions to Bluehost support (who are busy enough as it is), but members of the forum may know the answers offhand.

Any advice will be appreciated.

Casper

1) yes
2) yes. php mail() is actually the most-used spamming technique. Someone will sign up a new account and use a pre-written php script to send out a lot of emails before we can mark their account as fraud. This also happens quite often when a site gets hacked.
3) i think so. At least, it should be.

If you're a legitimate user and you're worried about hitting the limit, you can get your limit increased. However, all outgoing messages originating from your account count against your limit.

Let me reiterate that this is entirely in an effort to help prevent spammers from using our network; even in the worst case that they get past all of our other protections, they can only send out 50 messages per hour.

[casperl]

Thanks for the reply.

I appreciate the anti-spamming efforts. My problem is that at the moment I reach the 50 email limit within minutes of a new hour. I do not know where the problem lies though and until I can rule out spamming or malware on a SMTP account, increasing the email limit won't solve the problem. A simple report stating emails sent per email-user source for the last 24 hours would have helped. I still suspect one of the few mail accounts on a Windows PC is responsible, since the problem starts shortly after 8h00 and ends shortly before 17h00, which corresponds to the office hours of PC users. (This is the subject of different, still unaswered post - http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=767)

I have not factored the above three factors into my calculations. I assumed it would have been a better option to have the mail for users on a Bluehost account automatically forwarded to a different account such as GMail. This would have minimised my involvement with email on the user desktop (by not providing direct pop/smtp services) from a support point of view.

The automated notification system (written in PHP) is a crucial element though, and if that does not work because of mail not being sent it is serious. I may have to consider at some stage getting a totally new Bluehost account for that system as well as a few mission-critical websites without dial-in users etc.