Postfix: Limit Outgoing Mail Throttling

Introduction link

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

Usage link

You can add those lines in your Postfix configuration¹:

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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.

Limit by domain link

You can limit per domain if you want like this:

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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:

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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:

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

Postmap and reload:

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postmap /etc/postfix/transport
service postfix reload

You’re done :-)

Resources link