Cracking Down on Spam

[Corey]

Hi Everyone,

Starting Wednesday we will be automatically suspending any users that send over 100 Emails per hour from their account. It is important you make sure you stay under this amount as you will not be able to unsuspend yourself for this infraction. You must have staff do it each time so your site could remain suspended for as long as a day.

So to recap my very short paragraph above, you are only allowed to send 100 emails per hour. This is for free hosting only.

 

[techairlines]

Hmm what about Wordpress Comment Moderation emails? If for some reason we get a lot of comments in an hour (and since after accepting a comment, another email alerts of a new comment being published).

 

[Corey]

Any email being sent out counts, 100 per hour.

 

[jonathanyaniv]

I for instance, have changed my mail for my domain to be hosted by Hotmail. The 100 / hour rule doesnt imply to me, does it?

Just want to make sure..

 

[adamparkzer]

Hmm what about Wordpress Comment Moderation emails? If for some reason we get a lot of comments in an hour (and since after accepting a comment, another email alerts of a new comment being published).

Do you regularly get 50 legitimate comments to your blog posts per hour? I just scrolled through your website, and I couldn't find a single post that even had 50 comments all together...

As for spam posts, you could install Akismet, which will block most of them, and for the ones that do get through, you can just reject them so they only send one email and not two.

I for instance, have changed my mail for my domain to be hosted by Hotmail. The 100 / hour rule doesnt imply to me, does it?

Just want to make sure..

The emails that are sent via the PHP mail() function and through the cPanel web mail still count.

 

[jonathanyaniv]

Do you regularly get 50 legitimate comments to your blog posts per hour? I just scrolled through your website, and I couldn't find a single post that even had 50 comments all together...

As for spam posts, you could install Akismet, which will block most of them, and for the ones that do get through, you can just reject them so they only send one email and not two.

I found another way, go into your Wordpress, and go into your Discussion settings, and check off, "Users must be registered and logged in to comment". (This helps significantly)

Uncheck "Anyone posts a comment " and "Comment is held for moderation"

Also use Akismet, like Adam has stated.
Edit:

Do you regularly get 50 legitimate comments to your blog posts per hour? I just scrolled through your website, and I couldn't find a single post that even had 50 comments all together...

As for spam posts, you could install Akismet, which will block most of them, and for the ones that do get through, you can just reject them so they only send one email and not two.




The emails that are sent via the PHP mail() function and through the cPanel web mail still count.

Good, cause I hardly use either.

But good that you guys are combating spam

 

[koussy]

what about news letter? if I send more than 100 mails in one hour?

 

[adamparkzer]

what about news letter? if I send more than 100 mails in one hour?

If you send out a newsletter using the PHP mail() function and it exceeds 100 in an hour, you will be automatically suspended.

I recommend splitting your recipients into groups so if you have more than 100 people receiving your newsletter, you don't send it to all of them at once. You can try mailing out about 90 or so at a time (leaving 10 as a spare just in case you need them elsewhere) every hour.

 

[koussy]

If you send out a newsletter using the PHP mail() function and it exceeds 100 in an hour, you will be automatically suspended.

I recommend splitting your recipients into groups so if you have more than 100 people receiving your newsletter, you don't send it to all of them at once. You can try mailing out about 90 or so at a time (leaving 10 as a spare just in case you need them elsewhere) every hour.

good idea, thank you

 

[xav0989]

good idea, thank you

setting a cron to send 90 mails each hour from a queue should do the trick.

 

[lachytv]

Guys, Did you not just remove all dedicated mailing scripts? This should have worked, no?

My Website will never send more then 1 email p/w so I have nothing to worry myself about however... I have a forum on another host, that is sending over 100 p/h well over, this is becuse of PM's and sending emails though the board to other members, I don't have any news letters to speak of. If I did have to send one out at that speed it would take forever!

I would suggest that this will affect allot of forums and they may have to leave because of it; anyway I am still a happy camper because my site will never brake that email barrier but allot of others might.

 

[Twinkie]

I have to disagree with this rule. Not that your intentions are not well, or that I don't respect that this is a free service, but there are many legitimate reasons why emails might exceed 100 per hour. Now maybe at that rate for a long period is suspicious, but in one shot suspension is a bit too fast.

This is especially true for user services, like forums, blogs ect. Though Adam kindly pointed out on the first page that the person saying exactly what I am saying now does not have enough users to break this limit, a lot of people will, at spontaneous and unpredictable times. People without coding experience and a large audience would not be able to work around this limit.

Why not Limit the emails by some factor. Give emails coming from accounts that sent larger quantities lower priority. Or simply stop sending emails for the hour without suspending the account.

 

[lachytv]

I have to disagree with this rule. Not that your intentions are not well, or that I don't respect that this is a free service, but there are many legitimate reasons why emails might exceed 100 per hour. Now maybe at that rate for a long period is suspicious, but in one shot suspension is a bit too fast. A warning maybe?

Yes, I was trying to point out legit reasons in my previous post. I love x10 your wonderful but I don't like this rule. Lucky it will not affect me as I know I will not be sending out that many emails but I can see many reasons why someone might.

 

[Jarryd]

It is extremely easy to avoid going over 100 per hour, every forum has settings or modifications that allow you to change this. Not to mention there are hundreds of tutorials on google about how to limit amounts of emails sent.

 

[debio264]

It's been a while since I used PHP (I haven't actually had a webhosting account for a few months now because I didn't use my account much in the first place), but hopefully someone can comment on whether this is feasible:
If you're afraid you're going to go over the 100 mail limit, override the PHP mail() function in a file that's included everywhere in whatever application you're using, create a table in MySQL to hold outgoing emails, make the overridden mail() function dump emails there, and write a cron job that sends 9 emails every 10 minutes or something like that. Simple enough.
It also means that if your queue gets too full, you know you need to switch to paid hosting. The cron job should probably send 8 emails and 1 warning email for the hoster if the queue contains over 100 messages or so.

 

[Livewire]

It's been a while since I used PHP (I haven't actually had a webhosting account for a few months now because I didn't use my account much in the first place), but hopefully someone can comment on whether this is feasible:
If you're afraid you're going to go over the 100 mail limit, override the PHP mail() function in a file that's included everywhere in whatever application you're using, create a table in MySQL to hold outgoing emails, make the overridden mail() function dump emails there, and write a cron job that sends 9 emails every 10 minutes or something like that. Simple enough.
It also means that if your queue gets too full, you know you need to switch to paid hosting. The cron job should probably send 8 emails and 1 warning email for the hoster if the queue contains over 100 messages or so.

Feasible like you can't believe. Thats what I've got running locally so when it's time to actually publish it, it'll work.

The bonus is locally I can't use sendmail anyways - the mysql table lets me see the output from my code without having to set up a mail server


But yeah, it's -perfect-; it'd take a bit to code and set up but it is more than feasible and relatively easy to set up if you've worked with php before

 

[Corey]

We've been monitoring email usage for quite some time just with the automatic suspensions turned off. By making this change, less than 1% of our users will be affected while more than 99% will benefit by not having their emails rejected for being on blacklists due to no fault of their own.

It's impossible to make everyone happy but when we can make a change to benefit 99% of the user base, it's a no brainer. If people need more than 100\hr they'll have to upgrade their hosting.

 

[lachytv]

We've been monitoring email usage for quite some time just with the automatic suspensions turned off. By making this change, less than 1% of our users will be affected while more than 99% will benefit by not having their emails rejected for being on blacklists due to no fault of their own.

It's impossible to make everyone happy but when we can make a change to benefit 99% of the user base, it's a no brainer. If people need more than 100\hr they'll have to upgrade their hosting.

Yes, I can see this is fair, well done on hardly any down time so far btw. I guess this is due to rules like this.

 

[Derek]

This hasn't been answered. If my email is hosted on GMAIL APPS or Hotmail I assume this won't apply. Basically if its sent through the server? What if I set my site to send from the google smtp instead of x10's?

 

[3dhomejoe]

I think it would still count as e-mails going out