Error 554 sender quota rejection

I keep getting bounce messages for one of the users of my PHPBB3 bulletin boards who is using the email notification facility for watched forums.

I thought initially that it was his email server which was returning the error (gmail) but now I think maybe it's actually crusty which is returning it? I'm on fanta.

Could someone confirm that Dreamhost is bouncing this internally, and if so, is there anything I can do about it?

DreamHost Enforces Outbound Mail Limits/Quotas

In our effort to combat the ever increasing problem with Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE) a.k.a. "SPAM" we reserve the right to limit the number of recipients per hour customers can send e-mail messages to.

Q: How does this help?

A: The better we can limit the amount of spam originating from our systems (and spam forwarded through our systems) the less likely our servers will be black/gray listed by other ISPs and e-mail services. This in turn allows us to provide more reliable service to our customers (you!).

While trying to send mail, if you receive an error message which says "SENDER_QUOTA_REJECTION" that means that you have exceeded, or attempted to exceed your mail sending limit for that particular account.

Full Article
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/SMTP_quota

Ah, thanks. I had it the wrong way round - I thought the message was saying that the server had reached the limit for the number of messages that it was willing to receive from a particular machine.

What it's actually saying is that I reached the limit for the number of messages that I am allowed to send from my account, including, it seems, my bulletin boards.

This basically makes the 'watch thread' facility useless.

The full article says the limit is 200 per hour for PHP. I find it very hard to believe that I am sending that many.

Steve