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  3. Solution: Domain has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour

Solution: Domain has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour

Email Sending Error Message

When sending email from your domain name you receive a bounce-back notice stating:

Domain example.com has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour 5/5 (100%)

Symptoms

  1. Sending email from any of your email accounts fails.
  2. You receive an email delivery failure notice.

The Cause

Your account has exceeded the allowed number of bounced messages per hour and as a result your email is temporarily blocked from sending email.

For example, if you send 50 emails in an hour and 5 of them bounce-back from the remote mail server it means that 5/50 of those recipient email providers did not accept your email.

This temporary block is in place to prevent your account from being permanently blocked by 3rd-party mail servers and spam blacklists.

Resolution

The temporary block resets each hour.  If you sent emails at 12:30pm and 5 emails bounced then you will not be able to send email until the next hour which would be 1pm.

You simply need to wait until the next hour from the time your original email was sent.

Preventative Measures

To prevent max defers and bounce-back failure error messages please check the following:

  • First, make your account is not sending spam email without your knowledge. You can click the Track Delivery icon in cPanel to view your mail delivery reports. If you see a large number of delivery failures from one of your email addresses then we highly recommend changing your email accounts password in cPanel.  You can change your password by clicking the Email Accounts icon and then click the Manage button beside the email address.
  • Check your autoresponders.  Autoresponder will reply to all emails including spam email addresses which do not exist.  In general, we do not recommend using autoresponders as they tend to have high bounce-back rates.  If you need to setup an autoresponder you should only do it for a short period of time such as going on vacation etc.
  • Make sure your mailing list is up to date.  Sending mass emails from your web hosting account is not permitted.  A maximum of 200 emails per hour can be sent across all email accounts within your account.  If you use a mailing list you should periodically clean the list.  You should also avoid emailing generic addresses such as webmaster@ or admin@ addresses.
Updated on January 14, 2020

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