[Dovecot] Throttle New Connections?

Eli Sand dovecot-list at elisand.com
Wed Nov 21 00:10:11 EET 2007


> Yeah, I throttle initial connections per IP to something like 15 or 20.
> I started doing this after I got hit with a little more than 600
> connections/second for a few minutes.

Just a note to those who might not know - but Outlook (Express) and possibly
other MUAs like to connect once per "account", so if you host multiple
accounts for a single person, you'll have them connecting in once for each
account whenever their client checks mail/starts up.

I host my own email and I have about 5 accounts (I've had more in the past)
I check.  The instant I set a throttle on connections per second I had tons
of errors come up when I would check my mail since I couldn't successfully
log in for all accounts.

What you'd possibly be more interested in if you're hosting mail for many
people is some way to throttle based on account, though that would require
peeking at the protocol data and such.

Eli.



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