Too Many Recipients

Services Librem One
1

Made a reply to an email with over 70 recipients and a pop up came back with “too many recipients”.

I don’t know if this is me or the librem.one server.

The original email came from an aol user who didn’t seem to have a problem sending it.

I’m not saying it needs to be fixed or increased. I’m just pointing it out.

2

It’s the Librem One server, we have a rate limit of max addresses on an email to help prevent spammers.

3

It’s the server. It is common to have some limit (for obvious anti-spam reasons if not also for resource use reasons). I’ve set my server to a limit of 50.

Possible solutions:

  • Use Reply rather than Reply All (often a better idea anyway - and if this is some kind of ‘list’ then they aren’t doing it properly if you are having this problem!!)
  • Use Reply All twice but cutting out the right set of recipients on each attempt so as to reach everybody but not exceed the limit. Maybe @joao.azevedo could confirm what the limit actually is.
4

I thought as much. It seems however a more diligent spammer would spam his victims one at a time.

Thanks!

5

It’s mostly about the “fan out”.

When you send an email to 50 recipients via Librem.One (or any other email server), you send one copy to Librem.One, and Librem.One takes responsibility for identifying how many unique domains there are among the recipients and sending the up to 50 copies.

When you send the email yourself one at a time, you generate 50 times as much network traffic for yourself (and it takes 50 times longer, all other things being equal). If you have a fast internet connection, maybe you wouldn’t care.

But you are right, a spammer can spam victims one at a time. That has the advantage that the email content can be personalised (via mail merge), which makes it more likely to get through (not blocked as spam on the receiving side) and more likely to influence the recipient.

So if the spammer is spamming victims one at a time and using someone else’s mail server to do it (in this case Librem.One) then a diligent mail server has to apply recipient rate limits across multiple emails and not only apply a recipient limit independently to each email sent e.g. a limit of 50 recipients per hour whether sent as one email to 50 recipients or 50 emails each to one recipient.

6

Thanks, I also thought of those work arounds.

I also thought of replying-all and removing one recipient at a time just to determine what librem.one’s upper limit is.

It is someone’s personal list of wargamers built over the years whom he invites to his sessions on the weekend in Virginia Beach. Actually some recipients have moved out of town or are deployed. He wanted players to join in playing Mark Simonitch’s “Ukraine '43” by GMT Games. He has gotten 6 players and will run 3 copies in parallel on Saturday.

7

The right way to do a ‘list’ is that the email appears to come from the list and replies go to a single email address (the ‘list’) but sending an email to the list results in the email’s being distributed to all email addresses on the list. So the responsibility to do ‘fan out’ lies with the operator of the list. Then individual members of the list don’t come up against the recipient limits of their mail providers. (This of course also protects the privacy of the people on the list.)

However I understand that this is just some random who may be more interested in wargaming than the intricacies of email. :wink:

8

My friend’s wargamer list used to run on yahoogroups before it died. I’m in the middle of suggesting we import his list to groups.io (It is run by the same guy who invented onelist before it got bought by yahoogroups more than 20 years ago, no adverts either.)

1 Like