email address lists

[#1]

i would like to send an email to one recipient (myself) and several email addresses in the bcc field, but my message fails.  i suspect it is because i have too many addresses in the bcc field.

What is the maximum number of addresses allowed?  Can this number be increased?

I apologize if this has been asked before, i did a search but did not find anything.

[shaw-tony · Accepted solution]

Hey ianmckenzie,

Thank you for reaching out! The maximum number of recipients in one email is 128, I have more details on that here. That number cannot be increased as the limits are set in place to reduce spam.

Let me know if you have any other questions,

Tony | Community Mod.

[rubblehat]

well... for the last week or so, the limit looks more like 20 than 128... what's going on?   I'm getting "Server error: '452 4.1.1 <email address> too many recipients"

[Juergen53]

Never before have I encountered the message that there are too many recipients listed in my email. It contained only 21 addresses. All addresses are legitimate, i.e. gmail, telus, hotmail, yahoo, etc. When I deleted the specified address as per message and tried to resend, the same message came up with another recipients... and so on. Yet, the limit is supposed to be much higher than that. It seems that every week there is another new issue with Shaw and it is very tiring!

Below is the error message with the actual email address deleted for privacy reasons.

The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds a temporary size limit of the server. The message was not sent; try to reduce the message size or wait some time and try again. The server responded: 4.1.1 <xxxxxxxx@gmail.com> too many recipients.

[mdk]

@Juergen53 -- The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds a temporary size limit of the server. The message was not sent; try to reduce the message size ...

How large (Megabytes?) is the attachment? Some mail-servers limit the size of each "incoming" message.

Can you send a "test" message to ALL your recipients, without the attachment, to see if that gets sent to all of them?

[Juergen53]

The sent message was only four lines of text with a confirmed link for a video conference at the end of it. There were no attachments included in the message, consequently probably just a few kilobytes in size. Last week there were already two obscure messages preventing to send any mails. I don't know if they are related to the current issue, but I have included them here as well.

Apr 18th: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: mo22.dcs.int.inet shaw.ca ESMTP server not available.

Apr 19th: An error occurred while sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: mo22.dcs.int.inet shaw.ca 198.8.92.144 is on the ShawRBL blacklist.

All of them include the same reference mo22.dcs....inet. In addition to that, the IP address in the last error message isn't anywhere near my IP address.

I don't mean to heap it all on you at once, however, because of the identical opening statement of the error message I think it may be helpful.

[mdk]

@Juergen53 -- 198.8.92.144 is on the ShawRBL blacklist

Another contributor on this discussion forum insists that Shaw does not use RBL (Real-Time Block List) to filter E-mail.

That IP-address is within a small block (256 IP-addresses) assigned:

Network: NET-198-8-92-0-1
Net Range 198.8.92.0 - 198.8.92.255
Name TOTAL-SERVER-SOLUTIONS
Registration Wed, 04 Nov 2020 19:56:52 GMT
Full Name Total server solutions
Address 1050 W Pender St Suite 240 Vancouver BC V6E 3S7 Canada

> The sent message was only four lines of text with a confirmed link for a video conference at the end of it.

Did that message actually get sent? Were there any (large?) images embedded in the "body" of the E-mail?

> Apr 18th: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: mo22.dcs.int.inet shaw.ca ESMTP server not available

Shaw's SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server was (presumably temporarily) not available to accept anything you were sending.

> Apr 19th: An error occurred while sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: mo22.dcs.int.inet shaw.ca 198.8.92.144 is on the ShawRBL blacklist.

> the IP-address isn't anywhere near my IP address.

I wonder if this E-mail was being sent by a spammer, who injected your E-mail ID into the "From:" field, and then tried to send the "spam" message through that mail-server to an E-mail ID on Shaw's system? When Shaw "refused" the message, the message was "returned" to your ID, because your ID was in the "From:" field.

An "incorrectly-formatted greeting" could have been created by the spammer, as the first part of their spam message.

[Juergen53]

The message was eventually sent after several attempts. There were no images in the body of the email, just the four lines of text I stated. The email was initiated as a "reply to" to the members of my club, all legitimate email addresses which have been used over the years. It would be not an easy task for a spammer to insert him into the "From" field since I recently have upgraded my password to a higher more secure one, and not in any way related - even by guessing - to the previous password. In order for a spammer to insert himself, wouldn't he first of all be able to penetrate a Shaw server in order to intercept? Had I generated a "New" email, it might have been possible for a hacker to insert himself - however improbable - to disrupt communication. As I said at the beginning of this thread, I never has as many issues with Shaw over many. many years, not until about two weeks ago when all that started.

[mdk]

@Juergen53 -- It would be not an easy task for a spammer to insert him into the "From" field since I recently have upgraded my password to a higher more secure one, and not in any way related - even by guessing - to the previous password.

There are a few possibilities:

1. the spammer has obtained your Shaw E-mail ID and its associated password, and is logging-on to Shaw WebMail using those credentials, and "impersonating" you when sending the messages;
2. the spammer has obtained your Shaw E-mail ID and its associated password, and then is "authenticating" to Shaw's mail-server using your credentials, to get authorized to use that mail-server to send the messages;
3. the spammer has very easily configured their own E-mail client (Outlook, Windows Mail) to change the "From:" field in every message that they are sending -- just as easily as you have configured your own E-mail client to put your own name & E-mail ID into the "From:" field of every message you send.

> In order for a spammer to insert himself, wouldn't he first of all be able to penetrate a Shaw server in order to intercept?

The only way that he/she/they can "penetrate" is #2, above, after "stealing" your credentials. But, "intercepting" E-mail is a totally-different matter -- purchase a uniform that looks like that of a Canada Post employee, and stand beside one of those Canada Post red-coloured mail-drop boxes, and offer to take somebody's letters to "help" them open the access-door, and then not drop the letters into the bin. On a computer network, to try to "intercept" Internet traffic by physically "tapping" into Shaw's infrastructure network (coaxial-cable, fiber-optic cable) is not easy, although getting and abusing the ID/password of one of Shaw's Network Engineers who can electronically access/monitor the Shaw network is a different matter.

The point is that every Internet user has to trust that the Internet network itself is secure, both physically and electronically, from end-to-end. Watch one of those post-WWII movies, where Allied ground-forces in France deliberately rotated those multi-arrow directional sign-posts at road intersections, to have the arrows point in the wrong direction. That network of signage could no longer be trusted.

[kenreabc]

At the present time My Bcc is not function properly.  I went to shaw support, but it proved fruitless.  there is a mention of removing filters.  How is this done