Knowledgebase

Sharing webhosting requires repsonsible use of resources and solid anti-spam practices. Staying within these email guidelines will help insure the smooth operation of your server for everyone, and your neighbors will thank you.

Sending Limits

There is a 500 outbound hourly email limit per domain, also applied towards Mailman lists. If you send over this amout, most of the e-mails will bounce back with a undeliverable error.

You can safely check your POP email account up to 60 times an hour. If you go over this, you're likely to get a wrong password error message saying login incorrect (and you could probably use a break anyway). Just wait an hour and it will automatically unlock you. to prevent this from happening again make sure to set automatic email checking to something higher, such as once every 5 minutes.

Any mailing list larger than 5,000 will require a dedicated hosting solution. Note: dividing one large list into smaller lists to get below this limit is not allowed.

Mailing Lists Rules

Any time you're sending a message to a list regardless of the list size, you must throttle it.  We recommend you throttle it to at the very least sending 1 email every 6 seconds. If the mailing list software you're using does not allow throttling, you must switch to something else. PHPList, available for autoinstall in your control panel under Fantastico scripts, allows throttling and is recommended.

Without throttling, if you try sending out 500 emails, the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second. This causes the server load to go very high and for the entire server to remain sluggish until this process is completed. That creates problems for everyone sharing your server. Anyone who causes the server to overload will be suspended and the process creating the problem will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle on a large email list, you will most likely be suspended for crashing the server.

Any mailing list over 900 emails is only allowed to be sent to during off-peak times to prevent high server loads. Off peak times qualify as all day Saturday and Sunday, and 1am - 8am Central time, M-F.

You are not allowed to mail to a mailing list you were given or purchased. This is spamming, because the recipients never agreed to you personally sending them mail. We do not care how you justify it. This will result in termination of the offending account. Any unsolicited e-mail being sent will result in termination of the offending account. We take a zero tolerance policy against spamming. Any mailling list MUST comply with all guidelines set forth by the United States's Can Spam Act.

No Direct SMTP mailers are allowed (such as DarkMailer). Any bulk email should be relayed through the local MTA (localhost:25) for further delivery by the server and not done directly by scripts.

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