Postfix: limit outgoing mail throttling

Software version	2.10
Operating System	Debian 7
Website	Postfix Website
Last Update	06/08/2015
Others

1 Introduction

When you have a huge amount of mail to deliver, you can't release the queue at once and let the server maximize the outgoing mail throughput ! The result will be: you'll get blacklisted from a lot of MX servers.

That's why you should take care of it and do traffic shaping

2 Usage

You can add those lines in your Postfix configuration:

/etc/postfix/main.cf

smtp_destination_concurrency_limit = 2 smtp_destination_rate_delay = 1s smtp_extra_recipient_limit = 10

• default_destination_concurrency_limit: This means that postfix will up to two concurrent connections per receiving domains. The default value is 20.
• default_destination_rate_delay: Postfix will add a delay between each message to the same receiving domain. It overrides the previous rule and in this example, it will send one email after another with a delay of 1 second. If you want to disable this rule, either delete it or set to 0.
• default_extra_recipient_limit: Limit the number of recipients of each message. If a message had 20 recipients on the same domain, postfix will break it out to two different email messages instead of one.

Then restart your Postfix.

2.1 Limit by domain

You can limit per domain if you want like this:

/etc/postfix/main.cf

transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport   # Throttle limit policy mail (global) smtp_destination_concurrency_limit = 4 smtp_extra_recipient_limit = 2   # Polite policy polite_destination_concurrency_limit = 3 polite_destination_rate_delay = 0 polite_destination_recipient_limit = 5   # Turtle policy turtle_destination_concurrency_limit = 2 turtle_destination_rate_delay = 1s turtle_destination_recipient_limit = 2

Then add domains with the wished policy:

/etc/postfix/transport

gmail.com polite: yahoo.com polite: hotmail.com turtle: live.fr turtle: orange.fr turtle:

Edit master configuration to inform postfix of those config. Add those lines:

/etc/postfix/master.cf

polite unix - - n - - smtp turtle unix - - n - - smtp

Postmap and reload:

postmap /etc/postfix/transport service postfix reload

You're done :-)