Kevin O'Connell:
> I am trying to send 1394 email messages
>> (1 To: recipient and 1393 Bcc:'s.)
My first question is: Why?
If you really want to send to a whole lot of people, you shouldn't be
sending them through your ISP's SMTP server. First, you're wasting their
bandwidth. Second, you're fulfilling the profile of a spammer, so either
their software will automatically block you, or they'll get a red flag and
question you about what you're up to.
It sounds like in your case the ISP's blocking the mail. Which is probably
better than them suspending your account pending investigation.
You're going to have to find another mail server. You can either get a
different ISP, or use a separate mail provider. And while you're at it, you
should probably use a list server instead of sending a huge pile of BCCs
from your mail client. Many providers--both free and paid--will do this for
you; you just upload your list and send to the list address and everyone on
the list gets a copy.
If you're trying to do something legitimate (that is, notify a bunch of
people who've asked to be notified about something--changes to your website,
the location of your rave, whatever), this is the best way to go.
Of course if you're sending spam, they're going to cut you off. (There's
also the fact that spammers tend to want to send to 1300 people, then a
different 1300 people, then a different 1300, etc., rather than send to the
same list over and over again.) But if that's what you're trying to do, I'm
not going to help you (except to point you at http://www.cauce.org).
If you're still dead set on sending lots of mail through BCC's, you can ask
your ISP what their policies are, and if what you're trying to do is
allowed, tell them they've misconfigured their sendmail (or exim or qmail or
whatever) settings and you want them to fix it.
A fuller explanation follows, which you can skip if you want:
In the old days, people wrote software and protocols for the Internet under
the assumption that everyone would be nice. So, the mail protocol, SMTP,
assumes that anyone talking to the SMTP server is actually working on behalf
of the sender, and is actually sending something that the recipients want.
Then came the spammers and the spoofers. SMTP has no way to stop you from
sending mail to everyone in the world pretending to be
[EMAIL PROTECTED] So service providers had to come up with tricks to
stop this. (I'm going to be a little imprecise, both to make it simpler to
understand and to avoid making would-be spammers think they've come up with
a new clever idea to get around the restrictions and waste our bandwidth.)
The first trick is this: If you're talking to an SMTP server, you either
have to be coming from one of their customers' IP addresses, or you have to
be sending mail to one of their customers. This prevents spammers from
relaying mail through other people's servers.
However, it doesn't do anything about incoming (or outgoing) spam which is
targeted at their users (and possibly at others as well). So a new trick is
needed. One possibility: Anything going to a huge number of users has to be
coming from a known mail server, or from a server whose IP address matches
their hostname in reverse lookup, or... well, there are many variations.
So, you're sending mail from NW-Service.K12.mn.us to something like
smtp.buttout.com, targeted at thousands of users. Their SMTP server sees
lots of recipients, and says, "Well, this had better be coming from a known
mail server, or I'm not letting it through." It looks you up, sees you're
just some internal user whose mail client is talking to it, and decides not
to trust you. So it rejects the mail.
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