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Admins Accuse Microsoft of Hotmail Cap

Posted by samzenpus on from the who-needs-more-than-10-friends dept.

kurmudgeon writes "The Register is fielding reader tips that Hotmail has placed Draconian limits on the number of Hotmail recipients who can receive an email. The first 10 Hotmail addresses included in a mass email go through just fine, according to these reports. But any additional addresses are returned to sender with a message that reads: "552 Too many recipients." (Microsoft denies it has placed any such restriction on the number of senders.) This would appear to be a violation of RFC 2821, which states: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification."

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. And the problem is...? by Kelson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Let's look at that phrasing: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification." (emphasis added).

    Are they rejecting messages, or are they rejecting recipients?

    According to this, they're rejecting recipients with an obvious "try this again" code. Really that should be 452, not 552, but that same RFC 2821 says that senders should treat a 552 as temporary:

    RFC 821 [30] incorrectly listed the error where an SMTP server exhausts its implementation limit on the number of RCPT commands ("too many recipients") as having reply code 552. The correct reply code for this condition is 452. Clients SHOULD treat a 552 code in this case as a temporary, rather than permanent

    So whatever sending server runs into these limits should retransmit the message to the remaining recipients on the next queue run. Okay, it'll only reach 10 recipients at a time, which is annoying. It shouldn't be kicking back the error to the client.

    Really, assuming Microsoft has actually put this limit in place, the only thing I can see that's wrong, from a practical standpoint, is using the outdated 552 code instead of the more specific 452 -- but that same RFC people are waving around says that their servers should treat it as temporary anyway.

    Am I missing something?

  2. Dont worry! by Ariastis · · Score: 5, Funny

    No sweat guys, for 19.99$ per year, you can become a member of the Windows MSN Live Hotmail Benefactor Plus Live rewards program!

    Benefits include :
    1) Spam whomever you want, bypassing all spam filters!
    2) Send e-mails to more than 10 recipients (Also called the "I run a mailing list you fucktard" option)
    3) Free "Upgrade to Vista (Please)" coupon.

  3. I'm not TERRIBLY pro-MS, but... by DigitalSorceress · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, if everyone followed all the RFCs for email and didn't adapt, spam would probably bring everything to a grinding halt. As it is, with countermeasures and counter-countermeasures in an escalating spiral in the "spam wars", I sometimes marvel that email even still works at all.

    Granted, security through obscurity isn't really effective, but why should they bother telling spammers how small to make their batches in order to get things through? Make the bastards work a little bit.

    Wow, I've gotten cynical.

    --

    The Digital Sorceress