It's not likely that the daemon starts behaving differently after some time, so if some messages with less than 25 recipients are filtered there is probably some other factor that is causing it. If you can figure out what that is I can try to fix it.

Check all headers in the messages to see if there is any clue why delivery failure notifications loop. It might be a good idea to examine the Domains section in mercury.ini as well in case there is some problem there.

/Rolf 

Hi,

I wish to filter outgoing emails which have many recipients (say more than 10). This would

be from local and non-local authenticated smtp users.

I need this to :

1) Prevent users sending out chain mails to lots of users.

2) A pasword compromised user account being used to send out tons of spam mails.

Any help would be great. Tq

Kenny

That could be done with a daemon. I made a Rcpt checking daemon a while ago (to stop messages to specific addresses), and as it was easy to add the option to check the number of recipients to it I did that. I didn't have time for testing, though, but feel free to have a look at it:

http://downloads.serieguide.se/RcptStop.zip

This is a global daemon that checks messages when processed by Mercury core. Note that an event daemon intercepting the SMTP transaction in MercuryS probably would be better in this case. 

/Rolf 

Thanks Rolf, I have installed and tested. Works fine, however the delivery failure mail is a dead giveaway to the sender.

Not too good if I am trying to quietly delete the mail sent by spammer.

But on the other hand, what if one of your local users by mistake sends an important email with too many recipients and isn't aware that the message has been killed and that no-one will ever receive it? I could add an option to delete silently or send notification, I guess. Or notify only if the sender address is local, perhaps?

/Rolf

If it were an important email, it is not likely to have that many recipients.

On the other hand, do Mercury/32 have the option to reject outgoing email which have non local sender email address? I guess this would take care of the spammer problem.

Alternatively, how about not stating the reason for rejecting the delivery (or provide an option to edit delivery failure message)?

New version at the same location (http://downloads.serieguide.se/RcptStop.zip) with the option to send a less informative notification.

/Rolf

Hi Rolf,

I tried using and found couple of problems.

1) I use sryany to start mercury as NT service. Seems that if I start Mercury/Loader manually, RcptStop starts up ok. Startup using sryany, RcptStop doesn't get loaded.

The other daemon used is SpamHalter, which starts up ok for both cases.

2) The number of recipient setting is not saved. New startup will need to set the number again.

Kenny

1. Try adding full path to the dll file in daemon.ini, the working directory may be undefined when using srvany.

2. It's written to file whenever the value is changed, unless the new value is 0.

/Rolf 

1. Works!

 2. Meaning the value always shows 0 after startup? but not really 0?

The configuration is written to a file called rcptstop.dta in the main Mercury directory directly when changed. If no rcpt limit is found it will default to 0 (=no limit). However, if the value is set to 0 it will not be written to the file (as that's the default anyway).

/Rolf 

I have tried using RcptStop for a few days now. But encountered some problems

1) I set the limit no of recipient to 25, after some time (a day maybe), it starts filtering email which has less than 25 recipients.

2)  The delivery failure messages is stuck in a loop (postmaster to postmaster). Not sure why.