Postfix send rate limit per user/domain

I needed to limit the number of emails sent by users through your Postfix server, and store message quota in RDMS systems (maybe you have multiple MX).

I tried policyd or other policy daemons for Postfix;  but they all miss support for SQL storage.

With this piece of code you can setup a send rate per users or sender domain on daily/weekly/monthly basis and store data in MySQL (PostgreSQL,…).

To work with mqdaemon you only need a mysql table described like this one:

CREATE TABLE  `emails` (
`email` VARCHAR(65) NOT NULL,
`messagequota` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`messagetally` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`timestamp` INT(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL,
)

and setup configuration parameters (db_table, db_wherecol, db_messagequota, etc) inside the Perl script.

You must insert all rows for the emails you have to enforce! The script is configured to use a simple UPDATE.

Modify the postfix data restriction class “smtpd_data_restrictions” like the following:

smtpd_data_restrictions = check_policy_service inet:$IP:$PORT

To print the cache content with update statistics for username into log file just send a SIGHUP to the process PID using “kill -HUP $pid” or invoke the script with printshm paramenter (perl ./daemon.pl printshm).

To enforce per-domain quota set the search key ($s_key_type parameter) to “domain”.

Start the daemon with “# ./daemon.pl” and kill it with “# pkill daemon.pl”.

Take care of using a port higher than 1024 to run the script as non-root.

This daemon caches the quota in memory, so you don’t need to worry about I/O operations.

GIT repository

5 Replies to “Postfix send rate limit per user/domain”

    1. Of course u can! Just u have to do only few edits to the code, it’s pretty old and buggy. consider it a proof of concept. For my production envs i had to change many lines of code, starting from the threading model; this online version suffer of memory leaks.

      For now this daemon limits only outgoing mails, if u need to limit incoming it’s an easy change to do.

        1. Sorry but i dont have plans to release a better tool since i dont have much time to work on this anymore

  1. Hi,
    the following error is seen in the logs.

    what could be the problem. Perl is installed in the system.

    Error:
    install_driver(postfix) failed: Can’t locate DBD/postfix.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .) at (eval 6) line 3.
    Perhaps the DBD::postfix perl module hasn’t been fully installed,
    or perhaps the capitalisation of ‘postfix’ isn’t right.
    Available drivers: DBM, ExampleP, File, Gofer, Proxy, SQLite, Sponge.
    at ./daemon.pl line 271
    Perl exited with active threads:
    3 running and unjoined
    0 finished and unjoined
    0 running and detached

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