Re: [IMail Forum] Number of recipients
I would like to know what policy to follow terms of the number of recipients who permitÃs send an e-mail. I do not currently have limited, but I'm thinking about putting it at 70. Years ago, spammers loaded up the to: and cc: fields with dictionary attacks, 10s or 100s of recipients, but I haven't seen that very much recently. So a low limit is not really today much of a defense. Besides limiting the number of recipients per TO: or CC: field or header, SMTP protocol also has a limit of max header line length, which some MTAs like postfix allow lowering the limit of charatcers to 256 or whatever. All addresses up to 256 are accepted, but above 256, the recipients are silently truncated. oops Legit users who put 10s of recipients in to: and cc: are often forwarding jokes or articles to their list of friends. Some of my friends do it and their to: lists have easily 20, 30 recipients. I've just done some research over a week's maillogs for one of my IMGate clients on this very question and found, again, that nearly all msgs had 1 recip. Here are the number msgs with how many recips, nrctp = number of recipients: msgs recips == 73072 nrcpt=1 1476 nrcpt=2 308 nrcpt=3 114 nrcpt=4 96 nrcpt=8 75 nrcpt=5 22 nrcpt=11 21 nrcpt=12 19 nrcpt=6 16 nrcpt=15 15 nrcpt=13 13 nrcpt=7 11 nrcpt=17 10 nrcpt=16 8 nrcpt=20 7 nrcpt=10 4 nrcpt=9 4 nrcpt=18 2 nrcpt=14 1 nrcpt=83 !! 1 nrcpt=50 1 nrcpt=26 1 nrcpt=22 These were all msgs that passed clean in IMGate's spamassassin, ClamAV, and other policies so were legit and raised no complaints. Now above, these were number of recipients per SMTP session, not necessarily in the TO: or CC: fields, meaning that a list server may have consolidated many single TO: into one SMTP session. For setting any limits for any specific population of recipients, the best is to analyze the logs and come up with a report like above to see what limit would be reasonable. If the number of recips isn't causing any problems, then I wouldn't fix a non-problem. Len __ IMGate OpenSource Mail Firewall www.IMGate.net To Unsubscribe: http://imailserver.com/support/discussion_list/ List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://imailserver.com/support/kb.html
RE: [IMail Forum] number of recipients per message?
Oh, I get it now. So the number of recipients per message is the number of email addresses per message sent to the queue. Interesting. Thanks for the clarification and advice. -Jeff -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Daniel Donnelly Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 1:19 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] number of recipients per message? Jeff, With 3000 members and the 'Number...' set to 1000, this list will put 3 messages, each with 1000 recipients, into the Queue. Set to 500 and 6 message will be in the Queue. I'd suggest a setting of about 200, which will put 15 messages in the Queue and leave 15 SMTP32 processes free for other email. If you have multiple lists and expect all to get traffic, then use a bigger number, not to exceed 2000. Daniel Donnelly - Original Message - From: Jeff Demel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 10:21 AM Subject: [IMail Forum] number of recipients per message? I'm setting up an email list of about 3,000 subscribers, and I'm not sure what to do for the number of recipients per message value. The online help says to take the total number of subscribers and divide by 25 to get the number, but then states that it doesn't recommend going over 25. 3000 divided by 25 is 120! That's way more than 25. In fact, if you follow the logic of the help file, it would indicate that the maximum recommended size of any email list is 625. Please! So... What am I missing? Is the help file just confusing me? What's the real answer? -Jeff Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
Re: [IMail Forum] number of recipients per message?
Jeff, With 3000 members and the 'Number...' set to 1000, this list will put 3 messages, each with 1000 recipients, into the Queue. Set to 500 and 6 message will be in the Queue. I'd suggest a setting of about 200, which will put 15 messages in the Queue and leave 15 SMTP32 processes free for other email. If you have multiple lists and expect all to get traffic, then use a bigger number, not to exceed 2000. Daniel Donnelly - Original Message - From: Jeff Demel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 10:21 AM Subject: [IMail Forum] number of recipients per message? I'm setting up an email list of about 3,000 subscribers, and I'm not sure what to do for the number of recipients per message value. The online help says to take the total number of subscribers and divide by 25 to get the number, but then states that it doesn't recommend going over 25. 3000 divided by 25 is 120! That's way more than 25. In fact, if you follow the logic of the help file, it would indicate that the maximum recommended size of any email list is 625. Please! So... What am I missing? Is the help file just confusing me? What's the real answer? -Jeff Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
