Bulk Email Limits

Bulk Email Limits

You may have an email letter to send to several friends or a business newsletter to send to hundreds of clients. Sometimes you want to send out more than just individual messages. Unfortunately due to illegal and harmful activities from spam and virus creators we have had to place bulk email limits on the email system. These limits will not affect normal emails, only where the same message is sent to over a few hundred addresses at once.

Why are there limits?

Much of the spam you now get is not sent from specific computers. Spammers send out robot software (bots) on the Internet where they can infect your computer. Your infected computer starts to send out spam emails without you even knowing! Other email systems worldwide will then block your email address as someone sending spam, preventing you from emailing anyone. In extreme cases they may even block everyone using the same email system!

Spammers want to send as many emails from your computer as fast as possible before your computer is blocked. To protect you and other users of our email systems we watch for large numbers of emails sent in a short period of time. By making simple changes to how you send large numbers of emails you can still send large numbers of legitimate emails without being blocked as spam.

What are the limits?

Spam blocking software looks for certain behaviors. It looks for:
• How many emails with similar content are sent out in a short period of time.
• How many bad addresses it goes to. Spam goes to random email addresses so it typically has a lot bad address return errors.
To help separate legitimate emails from spam groups, emails that have the same content are assigned a point value. The point value is compared to a bulk email limit. The limit in our system is 500 points per 5 minute period. Receiving systems may have their own limits.

Good email addresses are 1 point. If all the addresses in your list are good then you could send to 500 people at once.

Bad email addresses are 10 points. If all the email addresses in your list were bad blocking would start after 50 bad emails in a short period of time.

The limit is a combination of good and bad address points. Your list of 300 names might contain enough bad addresses to trigger the limit. People do change email addresses so with any large list you will have some bad addresses. Keeping your list up to date will help you be able to send to more people at once. Remove addresses that are bad. Allow people an easy way to tell you when they don't want regular newsletters or other messages. The "bad address" may be someone who has refused the email by blacklisting emails from your address because they didn't want those messages.

What happens if I exceed the limit?

If you exceed the limit you will get an error message that emails could not be delivered. This is often a "602" error but may vary as some of the error messages come from email servers outside our system. Many other email systems have bulk email limits and we do not control their number of bulk emails received limits or error messages.

If you have exceeded internal limits your ability to send emails may be limited for up to 6 hours. If this happens please contat our technical support staff and they can reset your account prior to the end of the 6 hour time frame. It will automatically reset after 6 hours.

How can I send a newsletter to more to than a few hundred people?

The limit is based on number of emails in a 5 minute period. The simplest way is to split your list into parts and wait 5 minutes between sending parts. For example, if you are sending to 600 people split the list into two 300 person sections and send two separate group emails 5 minutes apart.

Some email software lets you set a time for the message to be delivered and this can be used to delay when to send different groups. The example below shows the Message Options from MS Outlook (when writing a message click on Options and select Options). The "Do not deliver before" option lets you set a later send time for the current message.

There are software programs that allow you to automate group emails without exceeding set limits. If you regularly send out bulk emails to several hundred or more people these programs will help with this process including setting how many addresses are sent emails per minute.

Entering "group email software" into your favorite search engine will bring up several software programs that will help you send out bulk emails.

We cannot recommend specific bulk email software as each person's situation is unique.

One caution: some bulk email software allows you to send emails directly to the Internet instead of through our email server. This will let you send to many email accounts at once with no outgoing limits. However, other email systems also have limits that identify what they consider spam sending computers. Those systems may blacklist your computer as a spam sender preventing you from sending email to users of their systems.

If bulk emails are a regular part of your business you might consider getting a static IP and setting up your own email server. While we will support what you need our email servers are configured to support a wide range of users. Setting up your own servers lets you individually configure it to your needs. However, with your own server you will need to handle spam, blacklisting, and other issues that come with Web-ster service.