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Microsoft's Office365 Limits Emails To 500 Recipients
suraj.sun writes "ZDNet's Ed Bott warns small businesses that if you sign up with Microsoft's Office 365, make sure you read the fine print carefully as an obscure clause in the terms of service limits the number of recipients you're allowed to contact in a day, which could affect the business very badly. Office 365's small business accounts (P1 plan) are limited to 500 recipients per 24 hours and enterprise accounts are limited to 1500. That's a limitation of 500 recipients during a single day. And the limitation doesn't apply to unique recipients. It's not hard to imagine scenarios in which a small business can bump up against that number."
There aren't really a lot of good things to say about this.
who uses it anymore? anybody with a lick of sense twitters, facebooks and buzzes their status & important messages to friends.
I guess they want to limit it to avoid spammers to use their service. However, 500 outgoing mails can be limiting if you have more than 10 employees.
Time to reinstall your WordPerfect 1.0! Be Free!
See this is Microsofts way of protecting the world from SPAM.
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And just wow, enterprises, limited to 1500 emails a day. I say Microsoft should try that for a couple of years before imposing that on everyone else.
Say you are an enterprise with 16,000 employees, less than 10% of those will be able to send a single email each nay.
I wanted to send email from a PHP app in a quick-and-easy way. GMail allows anyone with a GMail account to use them as an SMTP relay (which is awesome), but has a similar limit - I think it's 500 emails, and no more than 2,000 recipients or somesuch.
One of our clients has about 60 employees and averages over a thousand emails a day outside of the company
Google Apps has similar limits: 500 external recipients per day for free users. 3000 external recipients if you have a biz or edu account.
Sending limits: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=166852
...where the customer is the commodity.
You really think outsourcing something as basic as being able to compose an email or a word processing document or spreadsheet is a good idea? The stupidity boggles the mind. Yeah, let's increase the number of ways you're always at the mercy of your service providers and see what that does for your "core business".
Lesson is don't be lazy. Unless it's a specialised service that requires something special or you really can live with outages, host it your damn self.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you would like to unlock the software from these limitations, please Upgrade your COPY of this software
to the full version.
This shit was only cool when Apogee did that, because it was already fully functional and awesome until we wanted to go more places with what we already had, but when Apple and others do that it's just a big turn-off because it's not fully functional and there are no timers in place to scale the rate at which the software executes or even spawn parallel threads. F-U Apple.
Oh this is Microsoft? Nevermind, that's their feature. Yay Microsoft, protecting us from spammers that might think of using their software's Send but probably get-around this limitation by a B/CC me knowing how Microsoft implements their restrictions at the UI rather than a ruleset.
The actual limit is 500 emails per day per recipient [1]. Still not optimal but much harder to run into for smaller businesses.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
The limit is 500 recipients per mailbox, so with 20 mailboxes you can potentially communicate with 10 000 people per 24 hours.
Given that they charge $6month/user, you'd think that that would chill spammers out of the service pretty quickly. If you are quasi-legit(yeah, yeah, you're an 'opt-in marketing professional', right...), MS has your payment details and can always nuke your account if you don't heed warnings.
If you are an outright scammer, a major American corporation with a history of litigation against people like you seems like a very odd place to try to pay for spam delivery with your skimmed CC accounts, surely there are better dodgy operators who will be cheaper and more cooperative...
Being free, hotmail anti-spam is much more of a technical problem, since they have to fight robo-signups and account cracking(these days, guessing some idiot's password is probably easier than reading most captchas...)
Ironically that can become true in the far future.
Office 365 costs $0.20 per day ($6/month). If sending an email is worth more to you than $0.0004, maybe you should be looking at other providers who offer similar services.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Now that we're in the era of everything-as-a-service, people are going to be nickel and dimed to death on computing services, just as the cellular providers do, and Ma Bell before them.
By packaging things as a service which non-technical people do not understand it is easy for the provider to lay traps through nonsense such as artificial usage tiers and add-on plans to extract maximum coin from the subscribed sheep.
With the underlying technology being so cheap, such goofy pricing allows for plenty of wasteful overhead to pay paper pushers and advertising campaigns, costs passed along to the end user.
If the goal is to prevent abuse, set the limit far above what any human can legitimately use, like Gmail did with storage space.
500 attachment-laden emails which must be transferred, stored, and scanned for malware consume substantially more resources than a broad CC of a one-liner to a working group. Clearly, message count doesn't correlate well to resource usage. Where have we seen that before? Oh right, the larcenous racket known as mobile text messaging.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Instead of letting e-mails bulk up with huge morraines of backlogs, use reference numbers to refer to the message in the mailbox that this message most likely was a reply to.
You'd have to save byte ranges for each quoted section as well; otherwise, you break middle-posting (point-by-point bottom posting), which appears to be the standard for quoting on Slashdot and on a lot of newsgroups that I used to be on. At that point, you might as well just compress the e-mails in one thread tree with some sort of LZ77-family text codec so that later e-mails can consist largely of back-references to the history buffer.
...I'm sure you'd be publishing an alarmist article about how Office365 could easily be used for spam. 500 distinct recipients per day sound pretty decent to me, and far above anything a normal human being would need. If you need more you are either: 1. sending to a mailing list, in which case, boo-hoo, just use another product 2. a spammer.
Your solution to spam has failed
This is pretty much a non-story. First, you are only paying them $6 a month. Second, it is a 500 limit per mailbox per day. If someone is really sending more than 500 emails a day, then they are almost certainly doing some kind of email marketing. If that is the case, either split up your lists into groups of 500 and setup mailboxes for each list, or use something like constant contact.
Why would anyone choose a product that you have to pay for (Misro$oft ANYTHING) when it imposes limitations like this, and there is an alternative (LibreOff.) that is first, FREE, second, NOT restrictive like this, and third, did I mention it's FREE?!?
That's like there's two cars at a dealership. One's free, gets 38mpg, and you can drive it is much as you want, and even modify it and give it to someone else as long as you don't insist they can't have the same privileges you got... and next to it is the M$ car, it costs $400/mo to lease it, you can't lend it to anyone, you can't resell it to anyone (legally) without going through M$, and it gets 12 mpg, can't carry any more than the LibreOff. car, isn't any more comfortable, nor any faster, (in fact less of all of these) doesn't look cooler, and... AND... you can't drive it more than 100 miles per day.
Why the funk would ANYONE in his/her right mind buy the M$ car? Are they funking retreaded?
Swap it for something else that works.
In this case that also includes other versions of MS Exchange.
Fanboys that will tell me how wonderful it is should talk to somebody that has had to take care of the thing for a long period of time of read some FAQs on what to do when the thing fails. The stuff was beta for years - for about the first half dozen versions you couldn't even get a full backup suitable for bare metal restore without stopping everything and the only reason you can now is because another bit of MS introduced shadow copy. Look at archives of tech mailing lists online and you'll see the thing still loses emails at times which is pretty unacceptable for a production MTA.
Like the difference between a republic and a people's republic.
This is to prevent spammers from being able to send mail from *.onmicrosoft.com. This is the online service, not to be confused with Office, the desktop app.
From the article: "In this case, the new CEO had sent a getting-acquainted message to 400 of the company's customers and prospects."
"And prospects"? That's "unsolicited commercial e-mail". No opt-in. No previous commercial relationship. Just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you can spam.
Microsoft is trying to keep their Office 360 product from becoming a spam engine, like Hotmail.
Didn't the old services like AOL used to restrict the number of messages you could send? I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall people complaining about something like that.
The first release of any service has to start with some sort of limitation on what users can do in order to throttle the service volume while they work out what users actual needs are and what it's really costing to serve those needs. But you have to start somewhere to get out the door.
I remember the same arguments being raised 20 years ago when people were shifting workloads from mainframes and VAXes to the new-fangled early Unix systems and PCs. Who in their right mind would risk losing it all to a disk crash? Unix systems are unreliable!
I don't agree with putting everything on the cloud myself, and I hate it's very name (it's nothing more than a geographically distributed server cluster -- nothing new to the international businesses I've programmed for over the years.) But I digress...
You can buy a software package, install it locally, do your own backups, and comfort yourself that you're in total control. Or you can choose to outsource your services and storage, sign up for a service level agreement, and let someone else take care of it. Either approach has risks, and it's up to the user or business to decide which are more important risks to cover.
Most businesses don't want a local tech support team -- it's not what their core business is. Sorry, but the glory days of hiding out in the office of a mom & pop business hacking away at the systems and software are coming to an end. Those jobs are being outsourced and serviced. Did you think programmers were immune to change?
I don't like it any more than anyone else. I enjoyed writing batch processing and other striaght forward C code, but the 4GLs and reporting tools hit the market and those jobs went away. So started working with Oracle and embedded SQL, eventually branching out into Oracle DBA work and performance tuning. Then the East Indian contractors moved in to the Florida market and cut the rates too low for survival, so I had to change "careers" again. I did Neuron Data GUI development until the technology died, and I had to change again. You can check my resume data at Masterbranch if you're really curious where it went from there.
Life is change. You don't get a choice about whether you adapt -- the world will change with or without your approval.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Uh, 'cus LibreOff does not include an MTA, nor the fucking rocket scientist to admin it?
Dipshit.
Other people are free to reach their own conclusions, and decide for themselves what to think about a post with a "$" inserted in it. How about you grow up? No one elected you as a fucking censor.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just use gmail. Office Small Business doesn't sound like even a usable product to me.
... to actually find a less effective long-term response to spam than filtering.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
To moderators: parent is INCORRECT. Don't mod someone informative when they are telling a FALSEHOOD. Parent only made a mistake, which is entirely understandable and forgivable, but MODERATORS made MONKEYS of themselves.
Read TFA. Read it for COMPREHENSION.
Microsoft limit: 500 aggregate recipients per mailbox per day.
Intermedia's (competitor) limit: 500 recipients per individual email, but unlimited aggregate.
FWIW, seems to me parent has taken Intermedia's policy and exactly inverted it. That's incorrect on two counts.
In what universe would your mailer limit the amount of mail your company can send? It's not like it cost Microsoft any more to send it. This is a completely artificial limit to try to get you to pay more. In a perfect world this would drive everyone to a free mailer.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sending limits
To keep our systems healthy and your account safe, all Google Apps accounts limit the amount of mail a user can send. The limits restrict the number of messages sent per day and the number of recipients per message. After reaching one of these limits, a user cannot send new messages but can still receive incoming email.
Each Google Apps account can currently send to 500 external recipients per day. Google Apps for Business and Education users can send to 3000 external recipients per day. The email addresses can be distributed among the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields.
The restriction on sending new mail typically lasts for one hour, but can last as long as 24 hours. A user can access and use the account normally after this period, at which time the sending limits are automatically reset.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Greater than 500 emails constitutes SPAM in my book. If you're not a spammer and need to send more than 500... you should be using something professional, not a cloud-based thing which by design is supposed to be light-weight and portable.
M$ is a tribute to BASIC, where variables originally could be only one or two letters, followed by a type specifier (except for floating-point numbers).
Unfortunately, I'm well above that 500 number mark on a daily basis. :( Not that I'd willingly use o365... Yeck.
(What about Distribution Lists?)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I wonder why anyone would even consider this as an option for their business. You completely loose control of a large piece of your critical infrastructure environment and you can never really be sure that microsoft is not going to abuse the data they are maintaining. If anything Amazon EC2 outage has shown is that the cloud is not for anything critical if you depend on uptime for your business model.
It's a money-saving tactic MS provides to small businesses. If they wanted to send out more e-mail, they'd have to waste money on a second server (or use something besides MS software).
Other people are free to reach their own conclusions, and decide for themselves what to think about a post with a "$" inserted in it. How about you grow up? No one elected you as a fucking censor.
Well, OK, in that case let's abandon moderation entirely, all the GNAA and goatse trolls are being censored too.
Clown.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
where the emphasis is on SMALL, like sole proprietor, or mom & pop, or even LLC. In the typical 8 hour day, you would be sending one email per minute, with 20 minutes for lunch, to hit that limit. Who sends that much email? SMBs that want to use email for marketing should look at bulk remailers, or send out the bulk messages on the weekend.
The Enterprise plans have much higher limits; 1500.
In both cases, D/Ls count as a single recipient, so if you are emailing your entire company multiple times per day, use the "all users" instead of adding them each one at a time.