Mass e-mail question...

[GTaudiophile]

I'm trying to help someone. She's trying to BCC an e-mail to like 50 people, but whenever she does (or copies to more or fewer people), she receives an error e-mail from the "System Administrator" saying that there was no "available carrier" to send the e-mail. She can send e-mail one-at-a-time, but always has issues with mass e-mails. Where does the problem lie? The client, local server, or ISP? Do ISPs limit the number of e-mail recipients?

Edit: Norton AV 2004 is installed on the machine. Could it be limiting something?

 

[Fuzznuts]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
I'm trying to help someone. She's trying to BCC an e-mail to like 50 people, but whenever she does (or copies to more or fewer people), she receives an error e-mail from the "System Administrator" saying that there was no "available carrier" to send the e-mail. She can send e-mail one-at-a-time, but always has issues with mass e-mails. Where does the problem lie? The client, local server, or ISP? Do ISPs limit the number of e-mail recipients?

Edit: Norton AV 2004 is installed on the machine. Could it be limiting something?

the mail will get slpit at the mail server so norton only sees 1 copy so i doubt its the problem. alot of isp will resrtict the amount of names that a sender can send to i personally set it to 30 for out mail servers.

cut down the names untill you hit a limit. try 5, 10 , 15 etc untill you hit your block but at a guess i would say its the isp doing the resricting.

 

[MysticLlama]

Is is an Exchange Server by chance?
If it is, it's very east for the administrator to change the number of recipients per message to any number, and someone could have got out of hand real easy with a tight limit. (though the default is 64,000)

One thing to try would be putting all of the other people on a distribution list and BCCing it to the list. It shouldn't make any difference either way, but you never know.

What kind of data line is this going out on? Is it a company, or just an individual user? Dial-up/ DSL/ Business DSL/ T1/ etc.? I think that Fuzznuts could be right and it could be the ISP, but if it's a Business DSL or T1 line I would say that is unlikely and I'd look towards other things first.

Since you asked if it was client/local server/ or ISP, that's what was making me wonder about the connection. What's the local server?

 

[GTaudiophile]

The ISP is Bellsouth. The client machine is Win2K Pro, and the server is Win2K Server. But I actually don't think the local server does anything with her machine, as in a e-mail server. Her e-mail address is a bellsouth.net address.

It's a small business that she works for, using Bellsouth's Business DSL. The DSL modem is connected to a router, serving 4-5 clients, including the Win2K Server machine. The Server machine is a simple file server, containing shared drives, from what I can tell.

 

[MysticLlama]

Okay, so it's probably the ISP that's limiting the e-mail recipients, though that is odd for business DSL.

One way to get around it would be to set her up with a different SMTP server, which would be pretty quick to set up since you already have a Win2k Server box available.

Just set up an SMTP server on the Win2k Server machine, and point her Outlook client to there. Her return address and POP3 server and everything can still be the same, you'll just be avoiding their recipient restriction.

There are a couple of things you may have to fiddle with in order for her to mail back in to the company if it's all a single domain name, but you can PM me that info if it gives you any trouble and I can help you out with it.

There should be lots of little tutorials on how to set up an SMTP server in Win2k if you just google for it, and it shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to do, which would be a pretty quick test.

Drop me a PM if you go that route and need help with anything that you don't want to post specifics on here.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Thanks. I'll look into it and get back with you.