In this article I’m going to review why having excessive email spam filtering, forwarding, and BoxTrapper usage can lead to resource usage problems on your account.
A web hosting account is primarily for hosting a website, although along with that also comes email as a service. In most cases email won’t use up a lot of resouce usage on your account, but there are several things that could cause an account suspension related to email, and in this article we’ll touch on these topics.
Excessive email spam filtering
Obviously as anyone on the Internet these days know, email spam is a very prevalent problem. All of our servers come with the ability to automatically filter spam email using SpamAssasin.
However there becomes a point where server-side email spam filtering can be too intensive on the server, if your email account has gotten to the point where thousands of spam messages are attempting to be delivered to you on a daily basis, it’s probably time to start looking for alternative solutions.
If you’re on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server, you have the ability to find the number of times SpamAssassin has to run. If you’re on a shared-server and your level of SpamAssassin usage is excessive, our system administration team will typically get in contact with you. Typically your options would be to disable the server-side spam filtering, and instead rely on your local mail client’s filtering capabilities.
Excessive email forwarding
The ability to setup an email forwarder on our server to have mail delivered off to another email address can be a great feature. However when this reaches excessive levels it can not only lead to your account using up a lot of resource usage, but it could also negatively affect our mailing IP address’s reputation.
If you for instance have the primary domain name example.com and you’ve setup an email forwarder for [email protected] to go to your yahoo.com account, this could potentially lead to problems. Lets say that 10 different people send spam to your [email protected] address, with those messages getting forwarded off to your yahoo.com account, Yahoo sees those spam messages as being relayed from our server’s mail IP, and they could delay or even block further attempts from the same mail IP if the usage gets extreme.
If you’re on a VPS or dedicated server, you can find email forwarders or autoresponders on your server, to see if any one account has an excessive amount.
Excessive BoxTrapper usage
BoxTrapper is a challenge response system where only verified users can get their messages into your Inbox. In order to accomplish this, BoxTrapper sends a confirmation message out to each person that attempts to email you, any only when the sender goes through that confirmation are their messages directed to your Inbox.
BoxTrapper can be a great way to deter spam, but you do want to also keep in mind that typically spammers are going to be sending from spoofed or fake from addresses. This can cause BoxTrapper to unknowingly send a challenge response to someone that never sent you the original message, and if you get a lot of email the BoxTrapper usage can add up quickly to your account’s resource usage and lead to problems.
If you’re on a VPS or dedicated server you can find the number of times BoxTrapper has to run in order to determine if resource usage problems you’ve been having could possibly be related to your account’s BoxTrapper usage.
