Outbound message throttling on license expiry. Cisco ESA / Ironport

[nzmatto]

We recently had our Outbreak Filters, Ironport Anti-Spam, and Sophos Anti-Virus licenses expire on our Ironports. We were expecting the associated filtering to stop, which was fine, however we also noticed a massive throttling on our outbound mail. We appeared to be limited to sending 3000 messages per hour, and so a large mail queue quickly developed. 

While I was researching this a colleague was renewing the licenses. The moment they applied the new licenses the outbound throttling disappeared and the queue of over 20,000 messages was cleared in just a few minutes. 

I can only assume this has something to do with the Anti-Spam license, however I can't find any information anywhere about this. Has anyone else experienced this. Does anyone have a specific data sheet which shows exactly what the licenses do?

[dmccabej]

When a license expires it renders that feature useless like you suggested. Typically, for example in the case of Anti-Spam, the feature would just stop performing any type of Anti-Spam scanning and the messages would go on their merry way just bypassing the expired feature; however, there may be times where perhaps the WorkQ gets stuck on a service that hasn't stopped/restarted properly.

It sounds like maybe there were messages building up in the WorkQ waiting to be scanned by one of your expired services, but it's a bit hard to tell without reviewing the logs and diving deeper.

Thanks!

-Dennis M.