[H-GEN] Bigpond outgoing mail problems

Michael Anthon michael at anthon.net
Tue Jul 8 04:09:59 EDT 2003


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Harry wrote:
> Once it is sent he will normally receive mail back with 'Address unknown'
> and 'mailbox full' from addresses that were initially accepted. The rejected
> e-mail addresses vary from day to day, Bigponds 'help' was to just do what
> he is doing.

If this person has a linux box available you could use a mail relay 
setup on that host.  I believe most of th MTA have an option to limit 
the number of recipients per email.  For example, exim has "max_rcpt", 
which says... "This option limits the number of RCPT commands that are 
sent in a single SMTP message transaction. Each set of addresses is 
treated independently, and so can cause parallel connections to the same 
host if remote_max_parallel permits this. (Default 100)".

The big down side to this if you are connecting to Telstra is that you 
probably will pay more for delivering your SPAM^H^H^H^H^newsletter (that 
is instead of sending the email once addressed to 300 recipients[1] you 
send it 300 times each to individual addresses) if you are being billed 
for uplink traffic as well.  Of course, if you do set up your own MTA at 
the local site you can bypass the telstra mail server all together and 
just let it blast the mail out as it sees fit.  This will also result in 
higher traffic volume but assuming a fair number of common domains then 
it won't be anywhere near the 300 times you would get with my first 
suggestion 8^).

Cheers
Michael

[1]  By the way, the exim doco mentions that the standard specifies that 
a mail server MUST accept 100 recipients at a time. It also suggests 
that the MTA should also gracefully handle more than 100 by sending back 
a certain error code that the sender should recognise as meaning "you 
need to resend the email to this set of recipients" after the limit of 
the receiving MTA is reached.


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