sendmail error 452 Too many recipients received this hour

Question

We are sending hell lot of e-mails to our BREW devices ( in sprint network ) and after a while our mail server queues the messages and gets stuck. When we try to flush them, we get following from the server. Is there a solution to this problem? Is this error 452 from our mail server or sprint's mail server? How to tune up sendmail for faster e-mail processing?

Running /var/spool/mqueue/n7QNOrsZ072192 (sequence 1 of 3)
<[email protected]>... Connecting to mx.messaging.sprintpcs.com. via esmtp...
220 lxnipc6003.nmcc.sprintspectrum.com ESMTP
>>> EHLO smtp.xyz.com
250-lxnipc6003.nmcc.sprintspectrum.com
250-8BITMIME
250 SIZE 20480
>>> MAIL From:<[email protected]> SIZE=1148
250 sender <[email protected]> ok
>>> RCPT To:<[email protected]>
452 Too many recipients received this hour
<[email protected]>... Deferred: 452 Too many recipients received this hour
>>> DATA
503 #5.5.1 RCPT first
>>> RSET
250 reset

Answer 1

This is called grey-listing. When you send too many e-mails (or more often - a certain number of e-mails where a recipient does not exist) a destination mail server does not black list you, but instead they temporarily block access from your mail server (essentially the IP address of your mail server). Usually this block is set for 1 hour but obviously can vary depending on the configuration.

You can do several things:

1. Contact the admins of the domain in question (e.g. [email protected]) and request your IP address to be whitelisted. (They may refuse)
2. Check/increase time e-mails can stay in your local queues (to have more chances of them to retry and finally get delivered
3. Add more public IP addresses to your server