Too many recipients

J

Jim S

I have a thread going on in mozilla.support.thunderbird on the problem of
sending to too many addresses.
I was in the process of moving to Thunderbird for a couple of reasons and
tried to use it to send to 109 addresses (BCC). I got an error message
saying I couldn't do that. It turns out that both my Gmail and Virgin Media
isps have a limit to of 100 addresses per post.
HOWEVER not knowing that at the time I repeated the process using OL 2010
and had no error message. Now short of emailing all of the addresses again
I don't know for sure whether the email got through or whether it stopped
after 100.
As a test, I sent to my Yahoo address 55 times and to my hotmail 55 -
thunderbird squealed again, but a single copy arrived in both Yahoo and
Hotmail boxes.
Any ideas?
 
J

Jim S

I have a thread going on in mozilla.support.thunderbird on the problem of
sending to too many addresses.
I was in the process of moving to Thunderbird for a couple of reasons and
tried to use it to send to 109 addresses (BCC). I got an error message
saying I couldn't do that. It turns out that both my Gmail and Virgin Media
isps have a limit to of 100 addresses per post.
HOWEVER not knowing that at the time I repeated the process using OL 2010
and had no error message. Now short of emailing all of the addresses again
I don't know for sure whether the email got through or whether it stopped
after 100.
As a test, I sent to my Yahoo address 55 times and to my hotmail 55 -
thunderbird squealed again, but a single copy arrived in both Yahoo and
Hotmail boxes.
Any ideas?

PS the single copies were when posted with Outlook
 
V

VanguardLH

Jim said:
I have a thread going on in mozilla.support.thunderbird on the problem of
sending to too many addresses.
I was in the process of moving to Thunderbird for a couple of reasons and
tried to use it to send to 109 addresses (BCC). I got an error message
saying I couldn't do that. It turns out that both my Gmail and Virgin Media
isps have a limit to of 100 addresses per post.
HOWEVER not knowing that at the time I repeated the process using OL 2010
and had no error message. Now short of emailing all of the addresses again
I don't know for sure whether the email got through or whether it stopped
after 100.
As a test, I sent to my Yahoo address 55 times and to my hotmail 55 -
thunderbird squealed again, but a single copy arrived in both Yahoo and
Hotmail boxes.
Any ideas?

Sending limits
https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hlrm=en
("external" means using a local client, not their webmail UI)

Their excessively high limits for a free *personal-use* account is why
spammers love to use Gmail. From other articles, they say the per-day
sending limit is 500 recipients and max recipients is 100. I think the
above article is for Google Apps users (for which you pay for that
service).

Hotmail used to be 300 recipients per day (not e-mails but recipients)
when using their webmail UI and 100 recipients per day when using a
local e-mail client (i.e., when using their mail servers). Max is 100
recipients per day (so you could use up your 100 recipients/day quota in
just 1 message). That was awhile ago and I haven't found what are
Microsoft's current anti-abuse quotas on personal-use accounts
(Microsoft likes to hide that info). Their help gives you non-help,
like:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/errors-sending-mail

Sending limits change depend on if your account is new (how long before
it becomes old is not specified but some articles mention 30 days) and
your reputation (also not defined). If you get back something like 5
NDRs (non-delivery reports) in a day, that's another reason to lock your
account for 24 hours. You're bulk mailing and haven't updated your
recipient list so you end up sending to too many invalid e-mail
addresses. Gmail does the same lockout if you generate more than some
max number of NDRs in a day.

109 recipients per message is not an e-mailing to friend, family, and
coworkers. That's a bulk/spam mailing which is not the intent in
providing free personal-use e-mail accounts.

Your test of only 55 recipients in an e-mail sent through Hotmail may be
due to already consuming your maximum recipients per day quota. You
would have to wait another full 24 hours before doing that test again.

Yahoo is mum on the actual numbers for their anti-abuse quotas on
personal-use accounts. They only mentioned there are anti-abuse quotas.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail-for-desktop/SLN3353.html?impressions=true
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail-for-desktop/SLN3383.html?impressions=true

These are personal-use accounts. Why are you sending to more than a
couple dozen recipients for a single e-mail? If you want to send bulk
or spam mails then you need to slice it up across multiple days or get a
business-use account with higher quotas. Sending a newsletter to a
large number of your church members doesn't obviate that you are trying
to use a personal-use account for bulk mailings.
 
J

Jim S

Sending limits
https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hlrm=en
("external" means using a local client, not their webmail UI)

Their excessively high limits for a free *personal-use* account is why
spammers love to use Gmail. From other articles, they say the per-day
sending limit is 500 recipients and max recipients is 100. I think the
above article is for Google Apps users (for which you pay for that
service).

Hotmail used to be 300 recipients per day (not e-mails but recipients)
when using their webmail UI and 100 recipients per day when using a
local e-mail client (i.e., when using their mail servers). Max is 100
recipients per day (so you could use up your 100 recipients/day quota in
just 1 message). That was awhile ago and I haven't found what are
Microsoft's current anti-abuse quotas on personal-use accounts
(Microsoft likes to hide that info). Their help gives you non-help,
like:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/errors-sending-mail

Sending limits change depend on if your account is new (how long before
it becomes old is not specified but some articles mention 30 days) and
your reputation (also not defined). If you get back something like 5
NDRs (non-delivery reports) in a day, that's another reason to lock your
account for 24 hours. You're bulk mailing and haven't updated your
recipient list so you end up sending to too many invalid e-mail
addresses. Gmail does the same lockout if you generate more than some
max number of NDRs in a day.

109 recipients per message is not an e-mailing to friend, family, and
coworkers. That's a bulk/spam mailing which is not the intent in
providing free personal-use e-mail accounts.

Your test of only 55 recipients in an e-mail sent through Hotmail may be
due to already consuming your maximum recipients per day quota. You
would have to wait another full 24 hours before doing that test again.

Yahoo is mum on the actual numbers for their anti-abuse quotas on
personal-use accounts. They only mentioned there are anti-abuse quotas.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail-for-desktop/SLN3353.html?impressions=true
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail-for-desktop/SLN3383.html?impressions=true

These are personal-use accounts. Why are you sending to more than a
couple dozen recipients for a single e-mail? If you want to send bulk
or spam mails then you need to slice it up across multiple days or get a
business-use account with higher quotas. Sending a newsletter to a
large number of your church members doesn't obviate that you are trying
to use a personal-use account for bulk mailings.

We run a music recital non-profit group. 109 people, mostly old and
internet-nervous, gave their email addresses. I tried having a Facebook
page, but when they had to sign-in they got all wobbly. I now have a Blog
and they are happy with that except they don't know how to ask for
anto-updates. So every month or so I send out a heads-up that the Blog has
been updated.

BTW The 55 above was a test of 55 of MY yahoo address *PLUS* 55 of MY
hotmail in the same BCC which as I said appeared to get through on OL 2010,
but not on Thunderbird.
 
J

Jim S

Sending limits
https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hlrm=en
("external" means using a local client, not their webmail UI)

Their excessively high limits for a free *personal-use* account is why
spammers love to use Gmail. From other articles, they say the per-day
sending limit is 500 recipients and max recipients is 100. I think the
above article is for Google Apps users (for which you pay for that
service).

Hotmail used to be 300 recipients per day (not e-mails but recipients)
when using their webmail UI and 100 recipients per day when using a
local e-mail client (i.e., when using their mail servers). Max is 100
recipients per day (so you could use up your 100 recipients/day quota in
just 1 message). That was awhile ago and I haven't found what are
Microsoft's current anti-abuse quotas on personal-use accounts
(Microsoft likes to hide that info). Their help gives you non-help,
like:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/errors-sending-mail

Sending limits change depend on if your account is new (how long before
it becomes old is not specified but some articles mention 30 days) and
your reputation (also not defined). If you get back something like 5
NDRs (non-delivery reports) in a day, that's another reason to lock your
account for 24 hours. You're bulk mailing and haven't updated your
recipient list so you end up sending to too many invalid e-mail
addresses. Gmail does the same lockout if you generate more than some
max number of NDRs in a day.

109 recipients per message is not an e-mailing to friend, family, and
coworkers. That's a bulk/spam mailing which is not the intent in
providing free personal-use e-mail accounts.

Your test of only 55 recipients in an e-mail sent through Hotmail may be
due to already consuming your maximum recipients per day quota. You
would have to wait another full 24 hours before doing that test again.

Yahoo is mum on the actual numbers for their anti-abuse quotas on
personal-use accounts. They only mentioned there are anti-abuse quotas.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail-for-desktop/SLN3353.html?impressions=true
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail-for-desktop/SLN3383.html?impressions=true

These are personal-use accounts. Why are you sending to more than a
couple dozen recipients for a single e-mail? If you want to send bulk
or spam mails then you need to slice it up across multiple days or get a
business-use account with higher quotas. Sending a newsletter to a
large number of your church members doesn't obviate that you are trying
to use a personal-use account for bulk mailings.

OK so I sent my email to 110 different fake addresses and got a single
reply "Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients."
and I'm still not sure....
 
V

VanguardLH

Jim said:
We run a music recital non-profit group. ...

That's why I already mentioned the church group scenario. That it is
non-profit, church related, some animal humane group, or whatever does
NOT obviate that you are using a free e-mail account to send bulk
e-mails. The e-mail providers aren't going to give special privileges
to those who think they should have them. Just because it's not abused
to send spam or used for business mailings doesn't mean all others are
specially privileged to have higher anti-abuse quotas. Perceiving yours
group as "good little guys" doesn't preclude from their "laws".
I now have a Blog and they are happy with that except they don't know
how to ask for anto-updates. So every month or so I send out a
heads-up that the Blog has been updated.

I've never bothered much with Yahoo Groups (web-based forums and nothing
to do with Usenet) but have read about how they can provide mailing
lists. You create a Yahoo Group (you're the owner) and can use the
mailing list function to either send out newsletters or even setup a
mailing list group (similar to Usenet except the participants are
reading and posting via e-mail instead of an NNTP client).

http://email.about.com/od/yahoomailtip1/qt/How_to_Create_a_Mailing_List_in_Yahoo_Mail.htm
 
V

VanguardLH

Jim said:
<snip>

I suspect this might be my final post on the topic.
This morning I sent off using Outlook 2010 an email to 110 fake email
addresses plus one good hotmail address, one good Yahoo .co.uk address and
one bad yahoo.com address via my paid-for Virgin Media account (which is
managed by Google).
I got two replies: from Mailer -daemon 1) Your message did not reach some
or all of the intended recipients and 2) This user doesn't have a yahoo.com
account.
The genuine mails to yahoo and hotmail, both got through.

So you got results that you expected. You sent to invalid e-mail
address and got the status back that your e-mail couldn't be delivered.
You specified a couple valid e-mail address and those got delivered.
What was it that you expected to happen? Is it that Virgin's operation
worked as expected but some other e-mail provider was "flaky"?

When ISPs contract out their e-mail service to another provider, like to
Yahoo or Gmail, they can also negotiate variances in that service from
the default features in an "outside" account. You may encounter
different anti-abuse quotas in the Virgin-contracted Gmail account then
you would with the open or free Gmail accounts you obtain yourself.

When you send 1 message with N recipients to the SMTP server, you're
only sending 1 message, not N copies of it, to the server. The client
aggregates all recipients in the To, Cc, and Bcc *fields* in its record
of the e-mail and sends a RCPT TO command to the server for each of
those recipients. It then follows with just 1 DATA command with the
content of the message (client-added headers and message body). So the
server gets N RCPT-TO commands followed by 1 DATA command. It then
proceeds to send out a copy of that message to the N recipients.

You get one status back, if any (since no failures means no returned
status) for the entire mail transaction. When sending to a dozen
recipients, your server doesn't report back failed statuses for a few of
them. It reports back one status. So out of a dozen recipients, say 3
of them are non-deliverable (no such user at the domain, domain doesn't
exist, target mail server remain busy too long, some rejection issued by
the target server which rejects e-mails from your sending server, etc).
You don't get back 3 NDRs. You get back one which may be a generic
error to cover any number of failures or just the NDR for the first one
that failed. You never get to see the SMTP logs of the session your
sending server had with every receiving server for your mail transaction
so you may not be able to tell what exactly failed when you specify
multiple recipients.

If you don't want to go the mailing list route to establish
communications with your group (either 1-way for newsletters or
multi-way for discussions), why not change from sending 1 message to N
recipients to sending N messages with each going to just 1 recipient.
If you have the MS Office suite then you can use MailMerge in Outlook to
send N messages to N recipients in a list. Else, use a client that is
specifically designed as a bulk mailer. The caveat here is that many
e-mail providers, especially free ones, have a maximum messages per X
minutes anti-abuse quota. That is, you can only send so many messages
within some number of minutes. You have to wait until that interval
elapses to send some more messages. Some bulk mailers have the option
of slicing up a mailing list and delaying each chunk by a specified
number of minutes to avoid the max-messages-per-X-minutes anti-abuse
quota. They can also specify how many max messages to send within a
chunk since some e-mail providers also have a max-messages-per-minute
anti-abuse quota. MailMerge has no such throttling to avoid anti-abuse
quotas. With MailMerge, it generates N copies of a message for the N
recipients, dumps them all in the Outbox folder, and Outlook obediently
sends them all in the next mail session.

So if you don't want to use a server-side mailing list solution, get a
bulk mailing client. I'm not expert in that area but remember Sue
Moshers's (an MVP) site listed some but that list might be out of date.
Look at the bulk or mass mailers listed at
http://www.slipstick.com/utilities/. An online search or searching
common download sites (download.com and softpedia.com) might find some
that meet your criteria, and some might also be free. Some are add-ons
and can work with Outlook, like use the contacts defined therein.

You could try MailMerge with Outlook (and the mailing list in Excel) but
you might end up hitting the anti-abuse quotas at whomever you're using
as the e-mail provider. However, you'll know exactly which e-mails
failed to get sent (if you don't get nailed by the max-messages-per-
minute anti-abuse quota) because you'll get a separate NDR for each
failed message. Since you're sending them out individually, the one
status you get back from the server for the mail transaction will be for
the one message you sent at a time.
 

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