We have made a change in the way our mailserver processes messages sent to more than one person. We have added a sanity check. Messages may now only have up to 12 BCC or CC addresses. What does this mean? If you need to mail the same message to 24 people, you will need to add 12 CC to the first message and then send a second message with the other 12. Why the change? Abuse, of course. This is the reason many limits are set. This morning, we caught a user exploiting the email system by circumventing our previous limits to send spam. This was accomplished by keeping the originating number of outgoing email message very small to prevent checking, but by also including thousands of CC and BCC in the messages. Why did it work? The spammer was able to do this because we loosened the email rules in the past to accommodate a client that had a legitimate need to send email to multiple recipients. Lastly, our email servers are not intended for mailing lists. If you need to send bulk email, we suggest you choose a 3rd party service designed for that purpose. Mailchimp or AWS Simple Email service are two good solutions. AWS has a free level of service, and for bigger accounts, they have the lowest pricing structure we have found, about one cent per 1K emails outgoing (last time we looked). Thank you for your understanding. This new policy is not expected to affect more than one or two of our accounts. For everyone else, you should not notice any difference.
Monday, December 16, 2019
