Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
Only the police and military should be allowed to send more than 500 emails.
who uses it anymore? anybody with a lick of sense twitters, facebooks and buzzes their status & important messages to friends.
Are you still in Grade 11? Email is used extensively in the business world. I'm not going to 'twitter' a client or colleague asking them for an update on the latest price margin research.
RTFA. It says the limit is per mailbox, not per company. Still annoying sure, but the specific problem example you gave is not correct. Each of those 16,000 employees will have their own recipient limit *of 1,500 recipients since I assume 16,000 employess is not a small business anymore).
The limit is per mailbox. So every employee can send mail to 1500 recipients per day.
As I read it ("The maximum number of recipients that can receive e-mail messages sent from a single cloud-based mailbox in a 24 hour period."), this is a 500 recipient/day limit for each individual mailbox, not the entire account. Unless "mailbox" changes meaning when it's combined by the "cloud" buzzword.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
If you're a spam cannon you're not using Office to blast those emails, if you have half a brain. A simple spam mill is using a linux MTA and a perl script connected to a MySQL db filled with culled email lists. This will have not effect on spam. I seriously doubt that's the intent with this stupid limitation.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Are you still in Grade 5? The GP was obviously being facetious.
Actually I want to be able to set the limit lower. I don't send to more than 20 people on any given day. But a couple times my email accounts have been hijacked and used to send to 300+ people. If I could have set a limit to 20 that would have been great. Then had a secondary password for overriding the limit on any given day.
Essentially this policy should be translated as "We aren't a mailing list host. If you want to be a mailing list feel free to use Constant Contact."
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.
Yes, that is what the documentation says. But Microsoft tech support says "per organization", and the people who had the problem said that when they hit the limit, the entire company was shut off, not just the one employee.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The OP referred to the limitation as "stupid". Why would Ballmer refer to any feature of a Microsoft product as "stupid"? I think you may have misread the OP. The limitation is just a marketing tactic to get growing businesses that start on P1 to upgrade to enterprise. Nothing more, nothing less.
whitelisting is a horrible workaround, and is taking steps to avoid recipients needing to whitelist (which we will not do).
Until a "cloud" manager or a big customer forces you to. Email is fucking broken, face it. And white listing is a valid way to help ensure two partner companies can communicate reliably. If you were one of our suppliers, we fucking require that you white list us because we don't want to fuck with your stupid spam filters and whatever email server monkey bullshit you have going on that day. Technology is a tool for businesses to use to make money, not to be used for personal power trips. If you were my employee and you told me "we don't do that," you wouldn't last long.
That's strange... it's almost as though different organizations have different goals and different policies.
You seem rather angry about this.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Sure there is, you have PLENTY of choices! you can pay to upgrade (what MSFT hopes for) or you can use LibreOffice, or even Koffice which now runs on Windows too i do believe, or Google docs, and i'm sure there are plenty of others.
I'm sure i'll get hate for this but its the truth, we've seen the "one size fits all" approach and it sucks because what you get is Apple, the most expensive version or none at all. I've seen plenty of small businesses using Windows Home Premium and why not? The features in Pro are not the features their particular business uses so they save some money by going Home. Its the same thing here, those that don't spam the hell out of everyone with constant emails? They can go for the cheaper version. Those that need more? Can pay more or use another SAAS or even use a fat client.
You'd think as supposedly libertarian leaning as /. is you'd think folks would be happy about this. This isn't some all or nothing, you can choose not to crank out the emails and save money, you can choose to pay more, you can use other software, or you can use a fat client. sounds like control of the final decision is in the hands of the consumer, isn't that what we want?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Exactly. Its not to make email more safe its for profit. Its always about profit, this is supposed to be common knowledge. M$ plans to squeeze every drop of revenue they can from their total market monopoly on Office. The idea of the cheap plans is to get ya hooked enough to get you to buy the enterprise level ones. You need more than 500 emails? You must not be a small business! What YOU REALLY need is to upgrade for an extra $150 a month. People, I know we all hate spam but switch to a decent filter and stop letting it effect your slashdot posts. :-D
If you are working a 16 hour day, that's 1 email per 2 minutes, all day long.
I work with folks who blow through emails all day, pulling 12 hour days working between US, Brazil, EU, SE Asia, and Australia, and none of them would hit the 500 recipient cap.
Unless you're spamming advertisements through your email server, which really, there are significantly better options for anyway, you're not going to have an issue.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Uhhh...miss the first part of his post where it said " I want to be able to set the limit lower." he's not advocating MSFT set a lower bound, he's advocating the user himself/herself have the CHOICE to have a lower bound. sounds like a good and reasonable request to me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
LOL Definitely, because they don't have EXACTLY the same thing.
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=166852
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
They have that... ...."
Go into the preferences, select "block flash", "apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too" and "show a placeholder for blocked
Works like a charm, for me anyway.
If you're a spam cannon you're not using Office to blast those emails, if you have half a brain.
You've never met a Sales manager at a medium business, have you?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
M$ 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).
Well then it wouldn't be a problem as the summary is wrong and its 500/1500 PER SENDER.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager