Are you a SPAMMER?

Published by gordon in Too many emails too soon · Tuesday 24 Feb 2015
Tags: mail, lists, distribution, newsletters, christmas, wishes

How many emails do you send at once?

Have you got a mailing list (or like me, do you have many?) to distribute jokes? newsletters? invitations? christmas greetings??

Fred was in all sorts of trouble, a newsletter every week that was to go to 52 people. All of a sudden most of the people started receiving it 20 or more times.

It turns out that OPTUS decided he was a spammer, they blocked the mail being sent which caused outlook to stall, and then outlook again tried to get rid of the emails in his outbox. . . . . again, and again, and again.

Nobody knows how many emails sent through the optus SMTP mail server is too much, and nobody knows how many emails over what period of time are too many, suffice to say, before Christmas 2014 it was fine to send 52 in a batch, but subsequently anything more than 20 emails causes optus to block and outlook to stall, and then any group of 15 sent subsequently in less than an hour also stalls.

The solution!!

Fred opened the club gmail account.

Fred added all the contacts from his computer by exporting the contacts as CSV and importing into Gmail, then put all those contacts into a group.

Fred now attaches the newsletter to an email and it is sent to the group via Gmail webmail.

For those clever people reading this who say "why not just use outlook to send via gmail" you would be quite right, but then the limit would be 100 emails despatched at a time, after this gmail reacts just like optus. Fred is not sure what the limit is via gmail webmail, but he knows it is more than 100.

There is an upside of course!!

When Fred wipes his hands of distributing the newsletter he merely has to hand over the username and password of the gmail account and the replacement can carry on the task.

OPTUS is not the only email humbug, I have been accused of being guilty of breaking "email etiquette" through a number of providers including fastmail which exists only to send and receive email but places rather meagre limits on a free account (120 messages per day and/or 60 messages per hour and/or 30 messages per 10 minutes). Fortunately I have not yet run foul of iinet, although I am sure I come close each Christmas and once a year when I ask ALL my customers if they would like to vote for me in the business awards.

Be careful how many people you send your jokes to - you could be marked as a spammer.