cPanel - Email queue and allowing sending of outgoing email after the account has been on hold

Question

I'm using a cPanel shared hosting provider which limits the number of emails that can be sent during one hour. On the said hosting, there's a webapp which sends mass emails to some of its users, once per month (think of it as a personalized monthly newsletter, which varies per user). This tends to restrict the sending account, which I can revert to being unrestricted, via

cPanel > Email accounts > <account_name> Sending Outgoing Email [x] Allow

The thing of which I'm unsure is this.

Every now and then some email messages will not be sent after the account becomes restricted. Will my reactivation of an account delete the unsent messages from the queue, or will they be sent?

Is there any part of cPanel in which I could check this?

Answer 1

Edit: Check also @Steve answer for important additional information

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Based in cpanel documentation, it says this:

Restrictions

Use this feature to allow or suspend a user's ability to log in, receive mail, or send mail. You can also hold outgoing mail.

Select Allow, Suspend, or Hold for the applicable setting.

Notes:

• When you suspend an email account, the system also suspends any aliases or forwarders that redirect email to the account.
• When you select Suspend for the Sending Outgoing Email option, the server will reject any outgoing messages for the account.
• When you select Hold for the Sending Outgoing Email option, the system will retain all outgoing messages in a queue.
• When you change the Sending Outgoing Email option from Hold to Allow, the server will deliver all queued messages.

So it looks like your queued messages will be sent.

Answer 2

The answer to this is it depends - on the hosting settings.

In the cPanel documentation at https://docs.cpanel.net/knowledge-base/email/how-to-set-email-send-limits/ it states

After the system reaches a limit, it does not block additional messages at SMTP time. Instead, the system accepts and then handles additional messages per the value of the The percentage of email messages (above the account’s hourly maximum) to queue and retry for delivery. setting in WHM’s Tweak Settings interface (WHM >> Home >> Server Configuration >> Tweak Settings).

So as long as your hosting service has that set high enough your emails will be queued and then delivered. The default is 125%.

When an account exceeds the maximum number of emails it is allowed to send per hour, by default, any additional messages are queued for delivery and sent in the next hour. This setting allows you to limit the number of messages that will be queued by the system. For example, if you set this value to 125%, once the account reaches its hourly limit, Exim will queue any additional messages, up to 125% of the Max hourly emails per domain value. Once the account reaches 125% of the Max hourly emails per domain value, any additional outgoing messages are discarded.

It might be worth asking your host what value they have.

FWIW, this is not accessible by end users unless you have access to WHM (unlikely) and is part of the hosting service administration area.