Can I find out who is broadcasting emails on my server?

Submitted by rjrsinc on Wed, 04/28/2010 - 12:32 Pro Licensee

Is there any place in Virtualmin that would tell me the 'email sent' count per email user? Someone is getting me blacklisted.

When it rains, it pours. No issues in months, then 3 issues in 2 days. Go figure. I need a vacation!

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 04/28/2010 - 12:55

If your server is sending enough emails to get you blacklisted, you may want to check the email queue... either by typing "mailq" on the command line, or by going into Webmin -> Servers -> Postfix Mail Server -> Mail Queue.

Someone could be sending a lot of emails, but a common cause of what you're seeing occurs when a bot breaks into a website, and uses it to send email. If that's the case, you'd likely see a lot of emails from one particular user in the mail queue.

You can also use the bandwidth monitoring to see if one domain in particular is sending a lot of emails (in System Settings -> Bandwidth Monitoring).

Submitted by rjrsinc on Wed, 04/28/2010 - 13:42 Pro Licensee

So ther is no way to get a count of how many emails an individual user is sending? Or a report per account?

Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 04/28/2010 - 13:56

Correct -- sorry, I don't know of a way to determine what you're after in the Virtualmin GUI.

Often, looking in the email queue or bandwidth usage makes it obvious who or what is at fault.

Also, many blacklisting services will explain what caused you to end up on the blacklist.

If that's not the case in your situation, you could explore another tool for getting per-user statistics... there's a number of tools out there that can give you stats on email usage. There's many out there, but "pflogsumm.pl" seems to be one that a lot of folks use... you can read about it and download it here:

http://jimsun.linxnet.com/postfix_contrib.html