A friend of my just sent me a note complaining that his ISP (which is mine also) blocked another one of his emails today. He received the following message:

This message was undeliverable. This message has been found to be a potential spam message, and has therefore been blocked.

It was not spam, of course, but an important message sent to friends, family, and associates. And so, naturally, he was a bit upset, to say the least.

Upon examination, I noted he sent the message to 80 recipients. Yes, that is a lot, but then again, they were all legitimate, as was the email. And he is paying for the service. I knew most email providers limit email sizes but when I did some digging, I found out that most ISPs limit the number of recipients, and the number of emails sent from a single address per day too. If you use one of the following ISPs or host site email providers:

• 1and1
• AOL
• APlus
• AT&T Yahoo!
• Bell South
• Bluehost
• Cablevision / Optimum
• Charter
• Comcast
• Cox
• EarthLink
• Gmail
• GoDaddy
• HomeStead
• HostMonster
• HostWay
• Hotmail
• IPowerWeb
• LunarPages
• Lycos
• RoadRunner
• RockSpace
• Verizon
• Yahoo!

...check out your email limit policy here.

Excellent find, thanks

I have no problem with the ISP restrictions in this manner. They are after all anti-spam in essence and personal rather than commercial.

I detest and delete all e-mail sent to more than one address. Even from people I know. This is personal spam. This includes "Forwarding" in my opinion.

If you want to inform more than one person, let alone 80 or more, then you are beyond the personal space.

One can always break up the mailing list and at the same time appreciate the positives of anti-spam measures in place.

FTA:

If you run a web site and you plan to send out mass emails

If you run a web site you should be using a proper commercial ISP account.

Not to mention the article was posted by a commercial e-mail software provider.



...

Jephree is right in his assessment and I agree with his philosophy concerning mass mailings. However, there are times when a legitimate "non-commercial" need arises to get the word out to many people - wedding plan changes, class re-union announcements, family reunions, etc.

I myself run into these ceiling limits frequently in my volunteer work dealing with spam. I report spam to SpamCop in an effort to get the spammers blocked at their ISPs. First thing in the morning, my spamblocker may show several dozen spam messages waiting. The reporting process allows me to select all at once, and send them all at once to SpamCop for analysis. Unfortunately (but understandably) my provider often sees this mass mailing of suspicious emails as suspicious, and will block my reporting - forcing me to select a few a time to send. While I understand and appreciate the desire to block spam from being sent, it is irritating when I know my email is legitimate. That said, I blame the badguys for ruining it for all, and not the ISPs.

Not to mention the article was posted by a commercial e-mail software provider.

Jephree is right again that the link I provided is from a commercial site, but I note they are not an email provider, but a provider of email software "add-ons" - usually for MS Outlook. In other words, the company does not compete in any way with the companies listed in the link - this is not a competitive or conflict of interest thing and I took that into consideration when posting the link to the article. Additionally, the article did not simply state ISP's policies, but provided links to the actual policy pages of the providers mentioned. However, I should have added a "disclaimer notice" so I thank jephree for pointing that out.

*Some* of my emails from Earthlink to a particular address at Dslextreme has either been delayed or not sent over the past few weeks. When I send the same email to two or three email addresses, only the dslextreme messages are returned to me as either delayed or not received by Dslextreme. I contacted Earthlink and it blamed Dslextreme for rejecting the messages, and when the potential email recipient contacted Dslextreme, it blamed Earthlink (neither ISP claims to know what is wrong). My emails were all personal and not bulk. Any ideas what to do next?