Cannot send emails due to limit being reached!

[ltk007]

I have recently been receiving approximately 100 phishing emails every day and have created a filter to automatically forward these to report@phishing.gov.uk and to then delete them.

However, I am now being informed that I cannot send emails as I have reached some form of limit and to try again in a few hours.

Why do TT not have an exclusion list that excludes emails to report@phishing.gov.uk? Surely emails forwarded to report@phishing.gov.uk should not be counted as part of the limit.

Even more confusing is that I am using an email client and the email address receiving the phishing emails is a hotmail email address and not my TT email address.

[ltk007]

I wish it was that easy.

The Hotmail web client auto-detects the emails as being junk and redirects these to the junk folder. You cannot apply rules to emails in the junk folder, and moving them back into the inbox results in the rules firing after they have been sorted alphabetically on operation  (great bit of programming by Hotmail software engineers). So "delete" appears before "Forward" even though you specify "forward" and then "delete". You can see where this is going, so just forward these as best I can. Unfortunately, months later the servers/domain are still operational so not sure what AF are up to.

[ltk007]

Thanks for the reply. It explains why the behaviour is dynamic. Even after an hour has elapsed, I am unable to send emails.

I could as you suggest forward these directly from the Hotmail web client, however Outlook email filtering is primitive at best and filters are sorted and applied alphabetically, which is really not helpful. Additionally, emails automatically redirected to the junk folder are excluded from the filter even after they have been relocated to the inbox.

I will persist with this since as the source appears to be a single domain where most of the emails originate from, and it really needs to be taken down.

Thanks again

[Gondola]

The obvious solution is to send the phishing reports from the hotmail mailbox.  Good that you're reporting to the UK Government Suspicious Email Reporting Service. But why use your TalkTalk residential mail service to report hundreds of hotmail phishing attacks?

The hotmail address is pretty useless when it gets that many attacks a day. How many genuine emails per day? And detecting the genuine from the spoofed? Why don't you delete that hotmail address and start over with a new outlook.com address?

The TalkTalk stop on sending is temporary. Assuming you received a TT501 error message that means you exceeded the TalkTalk Mail sending limit that applies to your mailbox sending in any one hour to more than the expected number of recipients from a residential use mail service. The normal sending allowance for your mailbox will be restored in an hour. A TT502 error message means you exceeded the daily sending allowance and in that case the full allowance for your mailbox gets gradually restored over the next 24 hours.

TalkTalk will flex the allowances and may impose lower limits for a mailbox if suspicious activity is detected. There are no exclusions. It's purely a count of recipient numbers that triggers the spam protection system to rate limit sending from a TalkTalk mailbox.