» Plesk Qmail and Remote Black Lists (or Plesk says Qmail not started)

With the recent increase in SPAM volume, I have had two clients contact me with Qmail problems on Plesk servers. The error they were receiving was in the status page of the Plesk admin panel. Under the status line for Qmail, Plesk said

Several attempts to restart Qmail produced the same results. Restart the server… still no Qmail. Looking through the Qmail settings in Plesk I noticed the server owner had ticked _all_ RBL. Each blacklist check requires a distinct call to the specified RBL service for every email. A busy server with many domains might have several thousand email addresses on it. With only a hundred SPAMs a day to each email address (I get 400+ a day on my main accounts), its easy to see how Qmail could get worked over with a million RBL checks a day. Not to mention the load added to the RBL servers themselves.

I un-ticked all but two RBL checks and Qmail started right up. There is a limit to how many RBL services Plesk Qmail can support. I would recommend only a couple. If many SPAMs are still getting through select a few different ones, don’t just blindly add more checks. More is not always better. Sometimes more is just more. I suggest testing various combinations until you find the best for your server and users.

Another worthwhile note is that these RBLs sometimes go away or are inaccessible for a period of time. If you are trying to use one that is down, all of your mail will be delayed while each attempt has to time out before Qmail can process the mail further. If you have problems with sluggish mail check the sites of the RBLs in use to verify they are indeed active.

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