Slow down Postfix

[pijnack]

At my school, students love it to hold the enterkey in squirrelmail to send hundreds of mails in a few seconds.
I tried to slow down Postfix 2.2.5 with
anvil directives like:
$smtpd_client_message_rate_limit =1
but it has no effect.

 

[jkupski]

Even if you slow down postfix, all those messages are going to get delivered eventually, anyway. The correct solution to this would be to fix the problem at its source--Postfix isn't the problem, your students are. Given that your chances of fixing the students are fairly low (though personally, I would start here with a loss of computer privileges for abuse of the system) I would look to Squirrelmail. Prevent it from sending "hundreds of messages per second" in the first place.

 

[pijnack]

Of course I disabled the mailaccounts of the spamming students. But I want to take measures to prevent abuse in the future, with Squirrelmail or otherwise. Our provider disables our account when we sent hundreds of mails per second. Postfix 2 has a built-in feature to limit the sending rate, just to prevent this kind of abuse. It is called anvil but for my server it doesn't work.

 

[jkupski]

What do your logs say? Have you read the manpage for anvil?

 

[pijnack]

My logs say nothing special.
Postconf shows the right directives:
anvil_rate_time_unit=60s
$smtpd_client_message_rate_limit =1
I did RTFM and STFW.

 

[jkupski]

Sorry, afraid I've never played with anvil, so I can't be of any real help. Are you sure the anvil daemon is running?