Hi there I have a few questions about sending very large masses of email messages. I should remind that I don't want to do that for spamming purpose, but only because a friend is asking me about that over and over:Assume a mailing list with 200,000 members. For simplification purpose, Suppose all the members are from Gmail accounts. Now I send an email to this mailing list and the size of email is 1KB. I have 3 questions now: 1- This email will consume 1Kb of my website's monthly bandwidth or 200,000KB (200GB)? I mean my website's server sends the emails one by one or for example delivers all of them to google and google takes over the rest of work?
2- If that email consumes 200GB of my monthly bandwidth, while my monthly bandwidth limit is only 8GB, sending that one email will explode and break down my whole website or it will just give me an error that this number is higher than allowed bandwidth?
3- Assume all the members have been subscribed by the list owner, not by their own, but at the footer of all the emails it is explained to them how they can unsubscribe from the list. If I send an email to 200,000 Gmail recepients at a time, Gmail won't send my website or my IP to the black list of Spammers?
Best Regards
On 4/28/2013 1:44 PM, Javad Hoseini-Nopendar wrote:
Hi there I have a few questions about sending very large masses of email messages. I should remind that I don't want to do that for spamming purpose, but only because a friend is asking me about that over and over:Assume a mailing list with 200,000 members. For simplification purpose, Suppose all the members are from Gmail accounts. Now I send an email to this mailing list and the size of email is 1KB. I have 3 questions now: 1- This email will consume 1Kb of my website's monthly bandwidth or 200,000KB (200GB)? I mean my website's server sends the emails one by one or for example delivers all of them to google and google takes over the rest of work?
It depends. If you have Mailman's VERP or personalization enabled, Mailman will send each message to the local outgoing MTA as a 1K message with 1 recipient; 200,000 messages all together. These in turn will be relayed to Google's mail exchange server by the outgoing MTA in the same way.
If not and you have default settings, Mailman will send 'chunks' consisting of 1 message with 500 recipients; 400 messages all together with 500 recipients each to the local outgoing MTA. This is controlled by the mm_cfg.py setting SMTP_MAX_RCPTS however this cannot be arbitrarily increased. In fact, the default 500 is too big as section 4.5.3.1.8 of RFC 5321 allows MTAs to refuse to accept more than 100 recipients in one transaction. How the outgoing MTA relays these messages to Google's MX is up to the MTA.
2- If that email consumes 200GB of my monthly bandwidth, while my monthly bandwidth limit is only 8GB, sending that one email will explode and break down my whole website or it will just give me an error that this number is higher than allowed bandwidth?
This is a question for your hosting provider. We can't answer it.
3- Assume all the members have been subscribed by the list owner, not by their own, but at the footer of all the emails it is explained to them how they can unsubscribe from the list. If I send an email to 200,000 Gmail recepients at a time, Gmail won't send my website or my IP to the black list of Spammers?
This is a question for Google. We can't answer it except to say that adding a person to a list without confirmation and relying on an unsubscribe footer is not good practice. Good practice is to require confirmation from every user before adding them to any list.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro writes:
I have nothing to add to Mark's answer to question 1.
2- If that email consumes 200GB of my monthly bandwidth, while my monthly bandwidth limit is only 8GB, sending that one email will explode and break down my whole website or it will just give me an error that this number is higher than allowed bandwidth?
This is a question for your hosting provider. We can't answer it.
Strictly speaking, Mark is correct. Being Mark means being always correct, so he can't speculate. :-) I can, however.
Experience reported on the Mailman lists over the past decade shows that there are two common local limits. One is count of recipients. If a single submission exceeds that, the local MTA may refuse to send that message, and you get the error, but don't use any bandwidth. No subscribers get the post. Not good, but usually not a disaster (for the subscribers).
The second common experience is that the MTA limits either count or bandwidth, and stops sending. Then some subscribers get mail and others don't. This is very bad in most cases. However, you get a new allocation next month.
The third case is that the MTA limits *and queues the remainder*. You are now well and truly hosed. You need to get your host to delete the post from the MTA queue, or you won't get a usable allocation for a while.... (Note that AFAIK this case is usually applied by services that have a daily rather than a monthly quota.)
3- Assume all the members have been subscribed by the list owner, not by their own, but at the footer of all the emails it is explained to them how they can unsubscribe from the list. If I send an email to 200,000 Gmail recepients at a time, Gmail won't send my website or my IP to the black list of Spammers?
This is a question for Google.
What Mark said. But I would add "and Yahoo and AOL and ..." because every one is different.
I can also tell you that in the three cases just mentioned, it doesn't matter what your footer says. All three have terms of service that allow them to decide what is spam based on any driteria they like. AFAIK, having an unsubscribe link in the footer isn't one of them.[1] Bulk mailers are strongly encouraged to register with them, and basically swear an oath not to spam.[2] All of the registration procedures are different, as are the procedures for getting out of the doghouse once you land there (and anybody mailing to 10,000 people or more on one service does sooner or later).
Footnotes: [1] In some jurisdictions that link will keep you out of jail, though.
[2] I've never bothered, but on my lists I have the luxury of being able to ignore the big freemail systems: my subscribers invariably have academic or personal addresses.
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 11:33:31AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I can also tell you that in the three cases just mentioned, it doesn't matter what your footer says. All three have terms of service that allow them to decide what is spam based on any driteria they like. AFAIK, having an unsubscribe link in the footer isn't one of them.[1] Bulk mailers are strongly encouraged to register with them, and basically swear an oath not to spam.[2]
Or, indeed, pay them…
All of the registration procedures are different,
They used to be quite hidden, but I seem to be able to find them quite easily, when I need to, these days.
as are the procedures for getting out of the doghouse once you land there (and anybody mailing to 10,000 people or more on one service does sooner or later).
+1. Even 5000 seems to be the threshold these days, for unknown netblocks.
-- "It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be – that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution." -- Hartley Shawcross, then (1951) Attorney-General
On 4/29/2013 6:44 AM, Adam McGreggor wrote: [snip]
+1. Even 5000 seems to be the threshold these days, for unknown netblocks.
Each has their own limit and sometimes it is based on history, sometimes on number reported as spam. You can send 100k emails and if 1000 are reported as spam you can get blocked or even 100 at times. Every provider is different.
I don't have it handy, but there was a list of some of the major provider's bulk sender sign up pages. I had it bookmarked until a browser crash lost the bookmark for me.
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 6:44 AM, Adam McGreggor adam-mailman@amyl.org.ukwrote:
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 11:33:31AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
All of the registration procedures are different,
They used to be quite hidden, but I seem to be able to find them quite easily, when I need to, these days.
Do you have some suggestions where to find them other than wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)?
as are the procedures for getting out of the doghouse once you land there (and anybody mailing to 10,000 people or more on one service does sooner or later).
+1. Even 5000 seems to be the threshold these days, for unknown netblocks.
Our largest list is currently about 8,500 and we are being forced to renumber due to an upstream contract, and the fact that we lack our own IP space... I so wish I had some IPv4 addresses...
Chuck
On 05/06/2013 11:40 PM, Chuck Peters wrote:
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 6:44 AM, Adam McGreggor adam-mailman@amyl.org.ukwrote:
They used to be quite hidden, but I seem to be able to find them quite easily, when I need to, these days.
Do you have some suggestions where to find them other than wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)?
Per the FAQ at http://wiki.list.org/x/4oA9, see http://wiki.wordtothewise.com/ISP_Summary_Information.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 4/28/13 10:33 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Mark Sapiro writes:
I have nothing to add to Mark's answer to question 1.
2- If that email consumes 200GB of my monthly bandwidth, while my monthly bandwidth limit is only 8GB, sending that one email will explode and break down my whole website or it will just give me an error that this number is higher than allowed bandwidth?
This is a question for your hosting provider. We can't answer it.
Strictly speaking, Mark is correct. Being Mark means being always correct, so he can't speculate. :-) I can, however.
Experience reported on the Mailman lists over the past decade shows that there are two common local limits. One is count of recipients. If a single submission exceeds that, the local MTA may refuse to send that message, and you get the error, but don't use any bandwidth. No subscribers get the post. Not good, but usually not a disaster (for the subscribers).
The second common experience is that the MTA limits either count or bandwidth, and stops sending. Then some subscribers get mail and others don't. This is very bad in most cases. However, you get a new allocation next month.
The third case is that the MTA limits *and queues the remainder*. You are now well and truly hosed. You need to get your host to delete the post from the MTA queue, or you won't get a usable allocation for a while.... (Note that AFAIK this case is usually applied by services that have a daily rather than a monthly quota.)
There is a fourth case, Host Provider sends the emails then sends you a bill for the overage at the rate specified in the contract. This could be very expensive for going that much over limit.
-- Richard Damon
participants (7)
-
Adam McGreggor -
Chuck Peters -
Javad Hoseini-Nopendar -
Mark Sapiro -
Richard Damon -
Richard Shetron -
Stephen J. Turnbull