edward the puppy eater (part 2)

we have a server at work that does mail backup for customers; currently for more than 500 domains. none of the customers actually need it, but they all think they do because they don't understand how mail works and think that if their mail server goes down for 10 minutes, their mail will fall on the floor and go missing forever. we try to explain that they don't need it, but they insist on paying for the service. who are we to say no?

however, this server doesn't really do much these days but get flooded with spam. spammers send directly to secondary mx's hoping to bypass spam filters, and in many cases, they succeed. but lately, more and more customers have been rejecting spam from our server with some non-permanent error so it just remains in the queue of our backup server.

isn't it hard to concentrate with those dancing aminals above? go ahead, watch them for a while longer.

anyway, at present this server has ~30,000 messages in its queue that, because it's a mail backup server, must remain there for over a week. certain customer servers are tarpitting us, some have even blacklisted our ip. yes, they're paying for mail backup and they've blacklisted the ip of our backup server.