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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."
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
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".'
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.
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