Are You a Spammer?

Are you a spammer? Probably not, but you might think so if you’ve checked the headers of some of your bounced emails recently. I’ve had half a dozen messages come back as undeliverable with the following error:

:fail: Domain mymailserver.com has exceeded the max emails per hour (50) allowed. Message discarded.

They were perfectly legitimate messages addressed to various personal contacts individually, no cc’ing, no bcc’ing, definitely not spam. And yet the header implies that mymailserver.com is sending out messages at a rate higher than 50 per hour, whether that means to the intended recipient’s domain or to different domains I’m not sure. Well, if it is, it’s not by my doing. Is it possible that the mail server company has mymailserver.com set up incorrectly, allowing spammers to use it as an open relay?

I did some Googling and it seems that it may simply be that mymailserver.com actually has a cap on the number of emails I am allowed to send. I do send an awful lot of mail, absolutely none of it is spam, but there could be some days when I send more than 50 in an hour, which could trigger the cap. So, I checked with the hosting company, the server is definitely not being used as an open relay, but because it is shared hosting they have a cap on how many emails can be sent in any given period. This prevents server overloads, but is a real annoyance for prolific mail writers who happen to break the send limit. Thankfully, they can extend the service on request, so now I can send 500 emails an hour. Well, I may be a prolific writer, but even I’m not that fast.