Exclude Domains from RBL Checks for Incoming Email

Update: This feature is automatically enabled as of cPanel 11.36.1.4
If you have RBL’s enabled globally on your server, there may be times when you want to keep certain domains from having their mail scanned against an RBL. While cPanel supports excluding sender IP addresses from these checks, some manual Exim modifications are needed to exclude recipient domains.

First, create a file that we’ll use to list the domains to exclude:

touch /etc/skiprbldomains

Next, you’ll need to apply a custom patch to one of the Exim perl modules used by cPanel.  You can view the patch here.

wget -O  /usr/local/cpanel/src/skip_rbl_domains.patch \
http://www.thecpaneladmin.com/files/skip_rbl_domains.patch.txt
patch < /usr/local/cpanel/src/skip_rbl_domains.patch
/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/buildeximconf
service exim restart

Now to exclude domains from RBL checks, simply list them in /etc/skiprbldomains

When cPanel updates, this perl module will be overwritten.  In this case we do not recommend setting the file to be immutable or adding it to /etc/cpanelsync.exclude, but rather adding a simple script hook to re-apply the patch after every Exim update:

echo “patch < /usr/local/cpanel/src/skip_rbl_domains.patch” >> /scripts/posteximup
chmod  700 /scripts/posteximup

Note: The information used in this post was provided as a cumulative effort between our staff, one of our clients, and the cPanel developers.