The problem (short version):
What do people do when they need to inform people in their address book
that their e-mail address is changing, but their ISP bars e-mails with
large numbers of recipients? I am having trouble sending e-mail from my
home office pc to a large (20-120) recipient list. The ATTBI (AT&T
Broadband Internet) server rejects the mailing with an error message that
essentially says that the server rejected the post.
The first tech support person said that ATTBI limits recipients to 25 per
message, and that one must wait a half hour between posts if there are
"many" multiple recipients. This made no sense since I had initially been
able to send a post with 45 recipients, and a second with 21 recipients.
However, a third message with 19 recipients generates the error message.
A second tech support person with whom I spoke said that he had never heard
of the half-hour rule and didn't know what the recipient limit was, but he
knew there was one. However, since I wasn't at the pc that has the ATTBI
account, he couldn't help me further. He did say that some e-mailers do
prevent large recipient lists. Is The Bat one of them?
The problem (detailed version):
Prior to becoming part of the cable revolution I had a local dial-up ISP.
When we went cable I continued to maintain the subscription to the local
dial-up account as a back-up. This also allowed me to avoid the bother of
changing our e-mail address since I merely accessed the dial-up account's
pop server using the broadband connection and downloaded the e-mail
directly off of the server. Outgoing mail was sent from the ATTBI mail
server but reflected the "old" address of the dial-up account.
Unfortunately, the local ISP was gobbled up by RCN which is now
discontinuing support for the local dial-up's server and is requiring us
all to migrate our accounts to a new e-mail server by the 17th. Thus,
all of our e-mail addresses will change form <username>@<local ISP> to
<username>@rcn.com. RCN does say, however, that they will indefinitely
continue to automatically forward mail sent to the local ISP to the rcn.com
address.
Since I have e-mail addresses (not yet used) with ATTBI, I would have just
notified everyone that our new address was the ATTBI address,
except.....ATT sold ATTBI to Comcast in November and a small notice at the
ATTBI website mentions that from February through April, ATTBI addresses
will be changed to Comcast addresses! The notice also says that users will
receive 30-days notice and that mail sent to the old address will be
forwarded for only 60 days!!!
It seemed to me that since I had to move from the local ISP within the next
week and since RCN would indefinitely support the forwarding of mail sent
to the old address, and since I don't yet know when the Comcast address
would take effect in our area, I decided to notify friends, family, and
associates, that our new e-mail address would be the one we would have with
RCN.
However, after tediously compiling an address book, I attempted to notify
everyone by sending a message to myself and bcc'ing everyone in the address
book. The outgoing mail server (ATTBI) rejected that message. I resent
it with about 45 or so recipients and it was accepted. However the next
group of 45 was rejected, but a smaller group of 22 was accepted. However
even smaller groups are now being rejected.
One way to get around this would be to use the dial-up line to send the
message and avoid ATTBI altogether, since RCN and the local dial-up say
they do not have limits on the numbers of recipients per message. But that
line is soooooooo slow. Is there a more elegant way for me to use The Bat
to send out multiple notifications to get around ATTBI's purported
message-limit rule without having to do this piecemeal?
Thanks and please accept my apologies for the long post, but I didn't know
how I could make this any shorter.
--
Avi
Avram Sacks
using The Bat ver. 1.61 at home [but not with this message]
________________________________________________
Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information:
http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
