The server responded: #4.5.3 Too many recipients..

[alangeeves]

Hi This has my head confused
I have been sending emails to the same group of people for several years via win xp and outlook express no issue. Just upgraded my pc along with Win7 and changed to thunderbird 10.0.2 at the same time. If I send to this group of about 40 people I get the following message.
The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds a temporary size limit of the server. The message was not sent; try to reduce the message size or wait some time and try again. The server responded: #4.5.3 Too many recipients..
Sending to one or 2 people is fine.Also as a test I installed win live mail and sent the exact same message to the same list of people from the same pc and isp without problem.
I am the secretary of a 4wd club so need to be able to send emails to groups of people. If I have to I will change to win live but would rather keep thunderbird as its far nicer to use and I dont fancy having to teach the wife how to use a 3rd email programme. Also importing everything into that will be a pain.
Thunderbird is saying the server is creating the message but the same server happily accepts the same email from win live
any thoughts please
I really want to keep thunderbird

[tanstaafl]

That sounds like a 452 4.5.3 Error: too many recipients SMTP error except it shouldn't also complain about the message size. That would normally be something like a 552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed maximum message size error, or a 452 4.1.1 ... temporary failure if it was due to a temporary problem with the SMTP server. They shouldn't be combined in one error message, the SMTP error codes are designed to report a single problem.

What email provider are you using?

I suggest you use the automated update to 11.0 (help -> about Thunderbird -> check for updates) to see if that works around the problem. 11.0 seems to have less problems than 10.0.2.

It sounds like you are running into a quirk of that email providers SMTP server that is picking up on minor differences in how the email clients send a message. I regularly read about people sending messages to several hundred people using Thunderbird.

If updating to 11.0 doesn't help I suggest you create a Gmail account (its free) and see if you have the same problem, as an experiment. That will help identify who is the culprit. Gmail imposes a limit of 100 if you use a email client (rather than webmail). http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answ ... swer=22839

You could also try installing an older version of Thunderbird in a different directory and see if it has the same problem. If you use the preceding version it should work well with your existing profile and you could run either one you want (just don't run both at the same time). Again, I'm not suggesting it as a workaround, just as a way to help identify the culprit.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Go_back_to_an ... hunderbird for the links.

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy y'all,

in addition to the above i recall reading a thread where this problem was caused by ONE invalid email address in the mail list. the server choked on it and gave the silly "too many recipients" error.

take care,
lee

[tanstaafl]

Good catch! After reading that I found viewtopic.php?p=1433927#p1433927 plus other articles such as http://its.uiowa.edu/apps2/support/article/2787 which states:

Sometimes when I send a message to a group of people, a "Too many recipients" error message is returned

Symptom: The error message usually contains a list of several e-mail addresses similar to the following: "<john-doe@uiowa.edu>... Deferred 452 4.5.3 Too many recipients

Solution: The "too many recipients" errors are temporary errors and delivery will get retried after a few minutes. When you see this, though, it means that there is at least one hard delivery error at the beginning of the delivery transcript. Look for "The following addresses had permanent fatal errors" and check the addresses listed for typographical errors, user unknown, etc.

[tanstaafl]

The ThunderPlunger extension has a validate email address function that can be run from the address book if you want to detect and delete invalid email addresses before sending a message using a list. You can check either a single card, or tell it to check the addresses for an entire address book.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunde ... erplunger/
It claims to work with Thunderbird 1.5 - 11.*

There is also the Check and Send extension but it only appears to verify the addresses exist in the address book, not whether or not they're valid.

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy tanstaafl,

thanks for the links. i was unable to find anything to back up my recollection. my search mojo was out for an extended liquid lunch i presume. [*grin*]

take care,
lee

[alangeeves]

thanks for the help
the suggestions helped me find a solution.
My isp is slingshot.co.nz
When setting up the accounts thunderbird set its default to send as startttls and port 587. This is fine for emails to one or 2 people but gets the error sending to many. The reason win live worked was that it was sending in normal SMTP on port 25. I was sure this had something to do with the problem but thunderbird appeared to not let me change to these settings. If you try and validate SMTP as none and port 25 it automatically changes back or worse changes one setting leaving sending impossible. To force it to port 25 and send unencrypted you need to save without validating the settings. It now works.
Another interesting thing that came up as a side note that might be usfull to other users. I also have a couple of accounts on xtra.co.nz which uses Yahoo to supply email. All the isps in New Zealand block relaying of email on port 25. This meant that since changing to Slingshot I have not been able to send from my xtra accounts. Thunderbird installed these accounts as send on port 465 and this will relay through slingshot so I can send from xtra again. I dont know if it will send to large numbers of emails but as I intend to get rid of these accounts at some stage this is not important.
thanks for the help

[grinapo]

Just a sidenote if someone googles this: 4xx errors are temporary so mail clients should retry the delivery in case the temporary problem went away (as it always ought to).

State of the art (maybe that's a joke, forgive me) mailservers don't reject the whole message when there are indeed too many recipients (like you try to CC the mail to 10000 email adresses) but accept the maximum and 452 the rest (old standard said 552 but it's really really obsolete), so the mail client can retry those which were rejected while those which got OK were already delivered, so 10000 addresses my be sent 10-50-100 apiece, in a while, retrying those which were rejected.

This obviously requires a level of wisdom on the mail client part since it should handle errors by recipients. (Technically RFC5321 Section 4.5.3.1.10. describes this which is out since 2008 but this section was already in RFC2821 [4.5.3.1.] released in 2001 so it shouldn't be a big surprise to anyone developing a mail client in the last almost 15 years.)

If Thunderbird doesn't handle that it's a bug. Scaring the end user by showing the temporary error may be unwise as well, since this is part of the "normal" delivery process, delayed as it may be.

[DanRaisch]

Thanks for your comment but you've replied to a thread that has been dead for three years.

Locking this due to the age of the original posts.