Reason and fix for ""Domain has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour""

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"Domain has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour (5/5 (26%)) allowed. Message discarded."

There are three major reasons for this message:

  • Exploited or hacked sites sending out spam emails. A few customers who send out mass mailings have been triggering this feature, due to the number of bad/undeliverable email addresses on their lists.
  • The disk quota for the email account/domain has been reached and new messages are being deffered.
  • There is no such email account created on the mail server.

SHARED LINUX (CPanel):

If you are on a Shared Server (cPanel) server, in case your account is infected please open a TICKET to our Technical Support. This way our technical team can investigate for infections and reset your limit. If you have installed some of the more popular CMS (Worpress; Joomla...), you can proceed and review this ARTICLE on how to clear your application of infections.

If your disk quota is reached, please follow the steps below:

  1. Login to your Cpanel.

  1. Click on Email Accounts.

  1. Choose the email account that is over the quota and click Quota.

  1. Either set your Mailbox Quota to specific number of a higher value or choose Unlimited and click Save.

If you are getting a non-existent email account, please make sure that your Mail Exchanger is set to  Local server by us following this TUTORIAL. Otherwise just create the missing email account from your Cpanel following this TUTORIAL.

VPS/Cloud LINUX (CPanel):

If you do have a private server VPS/Cloud, please follow the steps below on how to edit this limit:

  1. Log into the WHM as root.

  1. Click Tweak Settings.

  1. Click the Mail tab.

  1. Scroll down and find the Maximum percentage of failed or deferred messages a domain may send per hour setting.

  1. Change the % or you can disable this feature by selecting the Unlimited option Maximum percentage of failed or deferred messages a domain may send per hour.

Note: To reset the limit per domain you need to remove the following file via root Shell access:

rm -f /var/cpanel/email\_send\_limits/max\_deferfail\_domain.com

  •  domain.com = the domain where your messages are deffered

Updated 4 months ago