I have heard this story it seems over and over again, I also have been the topic of many email horror stories. They usually go like this

“I just setup a new server and within days we were on a corporate email blacklist, I contacted the company in question and asked why are we on your blacklist, why won’t you deliver our email. They shared with me an email log of thousands of emails being sent from my mail server through several legitimate email accounts. I ensured that my server was not an open relay so I asked these users, if they had indeed sent this many emails in one shot without any kind of unsubscribe link in the footer of their email. They had! I was so shocked, now what do I do?”

This is an uncomfortable and very perilous position. You want to allow your users to send email to get their job done however you as a systems administrator need to comply with the “Can Spam Act” passed by the FCC to ensure that email continues to flow. You also have companies out there who will block you for violating this act as a precaution on their part. All the while your users can not be bothered to learn about proper email procedures.

In my experience the only thing you can do at this point is to limit how many emails are allowed to be sent at any given time. If you are using OSX Server for Mail or Postfix for Sendmail then this walkthrough will talk about how to limit email recipients and stay off those dreaded blacklists.

Here are the basics that you should know, the following are all settings that can be added to the /etc/postfix/main.cf file of your postfix setup.

smtpd_recipient_limit (default 1000) parameter controls how many recipients the SMTP server will take per message delivery request. You can’t restrict this to a to/cc/bcc field – it’s for all recipients. For that you’d have to use a regular expression in header_checks to arbitrarily limit the length of each header to something reasonable. Read more →