[Mailman-Users] Mass Mail

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Sapiro writes:

I have nothing to add to Mark's answer to question 1.

 > > 2- If that email consumes 200GB of my monthly bandwidth, while my
 > > monthly bandwidth limit is only 8GB, sending that one email will
 > > explode and break down my whole website or it will just give me an
 > > error that this number is higher than allowed bandwidth?
 > 
 > This is a question for your hosting provider. We can't answer it.

Strictly speaking, Mark is correct.  Being Mark means being always
correct, so he can't speculate. :-)  I can, however.

Experience reported on the Mailman lists over the past decade shows
that there are two common local limits.  One is count of recipients.
If a single submission exceeds that, the local MTA may refuse to send
that message, and you get the error, but don't use any bandwidth.  No
subscribers get the post.  Not good, but usually not a disaster (for
the subscribers).

The second common experience is that the MTA limits either count or
bandwidth, and stops sending.  Then some subscribers get mail and
others don't.  This is very bad in most cases.  However, you get a new
allocation next month.

The third case is that the MTA limits *and queues the remainder*.  You
are now well and truly hosed.  You need to get your host to delete the
post from the MTA queue, or you won't get a usable allocation for a
while....  (Note that AFAIK this case is usually applied by services
that have a daily rather than a monthly quota.)

 > > 3- Assume all the members have been subscribed by the list owner, not
 > > by their own, but at the footer of all the emails it is explained to
 > > them how they can unsubscribe from the list. If I send an email to
 > > 200,000 Gmail recepients at a time, Gmail won't send my website or my
 > > IP to the black list of Spammers?
 > 
 > This is a question for Google.

What Mark said.  But I would add "and Yahoo and AOL and ..." because
every one is different.

I can also tell you that in the three cases just mentioned, it doesn't
matter what your footer says.  All three have terms of service that
allow them to decide what is spam based on any driteria they like.
AFAIK, having an unsubscribe link in the footer isn't one of them.[1]
Bulk mailers are strongly encouraged to register with them, and
basically swear an oath not to spam.[2] All of the registration
procedures are different, as are the procedures for getting out of the
doghouse once you land there (and anybody mailing to 10,000 people or
more on one service does sooner or later).

Footnotes: 
[1]  In some jurisdictions that link will keep you out of jail, though.

[2]  I've never bothered, but on my lists I have the luxury of being
able to ignore the big freemail systems: my subscribers invariably
have academic or personal addresses.