Tamebay reader John uses his email client for email marketing to his customers and had recently found his ISP has reduced the number of email recipients on a distribution list that he can send. John told us:
“I use various distribution lists in my Outlook email, to keep in touch with all my customers, I was aware in the past that distribution lists failed to send if too many names, so simply split into several lists, but was still possible to have quite a few in one list so I’ve been using same lists for many years, some with up to 100 names. Last Sunday I tried to send a mailshot and it failed with ‘error 452 too many recipients'”.
John uses a Btinternet email address, and it turns out that BT have reduced the maximum to 45 names per list as ‘part of their server migration’. He say it’s “all extremely frustrating when I rely on my email to run my business” and wanted to share the information in case other users run into the same problems, either with BT email or with other ISPs.
Email marketing services
The only robust solution is to use an email marketing service such as iContact, Constant Contact, Dotmailer, MailChimp or similar. These are service where you can build your own email marketing lists, segment them into as many mailing lists as you like and generally there are no limits to how many recipients you can have on a distribution list.
One Response
I wrote about this on the iContact Blog a while back – https://www.icontact.com/blog/the-blind-carbon-copy-leading-the-blind/
Outlook is not a suitable email marketing tool. In fact it can really hurt your business if you are not careful.