What is a bulk mail?

If you send out emails to more than say 10 people at a time, with the message “undisclosed recipients” then you are sending out bulk email. I had one instance where a group was sending out a marketing message to around 80 recipients. They received a lot of messages back that the mail was not sent. In fact it went out to the 50 people, the last 30 did not receive it.

50 Limit and 250/hr

Within the hosting we use there are two limits you need to be aware of. The first is the 50 limit. Any email you send should not carry more than 50 email addresses on it. If it does have more than 50 addresses the mail will be sent to just the first 50 and then you will get back error messages.

So break up any mailing lists into say groups of 40 email addresses which should work ok and send more than one mail.

The 250 limit is the number of emails you can send per hour from your domain. This means an email to 10 people, and cc’ed to 3 is 13 emails. So if you are about to do a major marketing push, do take care about the number of emails you are going to send out. Some may be rejected. If you are using Outlook, you can schedule these to go over night if you wish.

These limits are not normally a problem, but you should be aware of them.

What about my Newsletter on my website?

Many of the sites I have created use something called MailPoet which is integrated into the website and may be used to send newsletters out from the website by repackaging the content on your site. It is a very easy and efficient way of managing a mailing list through your site.

I personally run one for a village association which uses the same mechanism to send mails out to 850 people. None of you have mailing lists that big.

Where I have set up MailPoet for you I have throttled the send rate to around 70/ hour. This means when you send a newsletter the maximum flow of emails from the website is 70 email addresses per hour, then it waits an hour and sends another 70. This is done deliberately to make sure the 250/hr limit is not exceeded.

Bottom line: if you are using MailPoet in your site, this already takes the limits into consideration.

Why are there limits?

The limits are in place to prevent large bulk emails from spammers flooding the Internet. Even gmail and hotmail limit what you can send per hour or per day. Spammers often try to send 10,000 or more.

The problem the hosting company is trying to avoid is being blacklisted as a spam source. When that happens, many recipient email accounts will check the blacklist and reject your email.

It is perhaps also worth pointing out that most people would not knowingly send 10,000 emails from their account. Where it happens it is because an account has been compromised by a spammer or hacker. The account owner will generally be unaware that this has happened, unless they see a lot of rejection notices.

It is not in the hosting company’s interests to allow this to happen, so while they may not be able to detect a hacker getting into an account, they do monitor what leaves the hosting, and the server loads. They use a variety of mechanisms to detect problems. They do not want to end up black listed because it affects all of their customers on the server (this includes you).

Just over a year ago, many of you were located at HostPapa. It was because of blacklisting occurred far too frequently,  I moved everyone out to the current hosting company. So far their track records have been very good. However some of the receiving ISP’s have been tightening up their policies. So we all need to remain vigilant.