I'd like a little guidance, if anyone can advise.

I just tried sending a bulk Email to all my website members using my own Email Service Provider and not via the website. I needed to do this as I've a number of members showing 'Bounced' status or Opt-In Pending.

Unfortunately, The Email I sent was rejected as "Too many recipients".

Can someone please tell me if this means that my own ESP has limited the number of people I can send an Email to or is it just not going to some of the intended recipients because their providers are treating it as Spam?

Every time I try to send it again after removing one of the names that are rejected it just seems to come up with another name who can't receive it.

Thanks.

If there were too many recipients, you may need to copy the list into a notepad document where you can go in and break the list into a smaller group and then send 2 (or multiple) emails to your groups. Yes, individual ESPs have different limits... some may be based on number of recipients. Other may be on number of characters in the recipients field.

Yep. I always break my list up into groups of 50 or so recipients per email.

BTW - the name they show as the error is where your list went past their limit per email.

Just had this problem. Showed my emails went and were received, but pretty sure they treated as spam by the email account of the recipient. Individual email accounts have certain settings that individuals can set to receive only certain kinds of mail. Often when the carrier detects a bulk email it treats it like spam.

I copied and pasted each email into my private email account and am waiting to see if the response improves.

I am a Realtor and I have had this problem before with bulk mailings to my clients. Sending from my personal email seemed to solve it.

Kinda of a pain - but once you do it - the addresses should be in there for as long as you need them.

Thanks for your responses, everyone.

As it was sent from my personal Email I'm going to have to break the number down into groups as you suggest. I'll try Barbara's suggestion of 50 per group to begin with. Thanks also to Barbara for clearing it up about the name they show as the error, although it did look pretty random and didn't appear to be alphabetical each time I tried. If I look closely enough though, I might be able to work out how many recipients to include into an acceptable group.

Thanks again.

Mark:

I meant to write this earlier, but anyway.

Are you doing a mail merge? Neither yours, nor any of the replies, uses the term. There are a number of advantages to sending using a mail merge. One of them is that each inbound email has only one recipient. Another is that email addresses are kept confidential between you and your addressee. I won't say that using a mail merge will solve all your problems, but it will avoid the issue of too many recipients and may also go down better with your classmates. A few months ago I did mailing of 300+ addresses. I learned my SMTP host will do only 99 emails with the same subject line at a time, but adjusting the size and number of the mail merge files is pretty simple.

Thank you for that, Barry. I hadn't thought of using a mail merge.

I've now split my Emails into groups and so far it's been successful apart from one group which I had to split further. Not sure why that happened as it was the same size as the others. As Lynn said, it's a pain, but so far, so good.

Chelsea,
You MIGHT have some luck by contacting your email provider, explaining your situation [website administrator], and ask want the maximum number of emails you can send without any issues.

Nice idea, Steve. Thanks for the thought. I'll give it a go.

Got onto it straight away, Steve and was referred to this response -

Maximum number of recipients

"If you use Virgin Media Mail through a Web browser, you should be able to send to up to 500 recipients at a time. If you use an e-mail client (e.g., Windows Mail) instead, you should be able to send to up to 100 recipients at a time
Please remember that the recipients of your messages should be willing to receive e-mail from you. Virgin Media does not condone the sending of unsolicited e-mail (commonly referred to as 'spam').

If you exceed the sending limit, there is a chance that your account will be locked, temporarily preventing you from sending messages through the Virgin Media mail server."

My list is close to 400 Email addresses.

Great news.
Nothing ventured,

Nothing gained!