421 too many messages???

[licquorice]

Because of email problems, how bizarre. There is no need to use BT email, in fact I can't imagine why anybody would use a mail service from an  ISP they had just moved to.

[New_To_UK]

421 too many messages is different issue -

this is not BT issue where senders to BT service are sending from suspect addresses with poor sending practices. They are sending a high volume of email which is triggering industry standard thresholds causing temporary blocks. These complaints are likely to be from small senders who are not very technical and don’t realise their mistake. They should enlist the help of deliverability companies as reputed companies send high volumes of email all the time perfectly fine.

General outlook send/receive is different issue -

This is a BT issue which is intermittent but fairly regular and I have raised this several times with no luck

Reply all to more than 50 users is different issue
This is just a artificial limit imposed by the service and is not a fault. This is too many recipients as opposed to too many messages.

[Stu_B]

As to your thid point, yes if the error message were changed to "too many recipients" that would be much more informative and helpful to the customers who have the problem. But that is not a complete solution. A limit on recipient numbers is obviously necessary but 50 is probably rather too constraining - many "personal" users with BT accounts may be volunteer committe members, etc, of small organisations who will need to communicaate with over 50 group members so will stumble into this problem. Furthermore, they will stumble in unknowingly because the existance of such a limit (and the limit value of 50) is no-where made clear when they sign up to a BT account. But worst of all, when people DO have this problem, the BT helpdesk teams are either not sufficiently trained to understand the problem, or are told instead to just blame it on Microsoft, etc.  The apparrent BT policy of trying to "pass the buck" (when there is in fact a very simple honest answer that could be given to the customer - e.g. "I'm very sorry, your BT account is fundamentlly limited to 50 recipients per email, if you send messages with more than 50 we temporarily block your account but it will restore itself in 24 hrs" -  seems to be the most appalling example of poor customer relations , bordering on total contempt for customers.

Why is BT so awful!

[New_To_UK]

Yes, 50 is a feature of the old days when technology was limited in identifying outbound spam. This should be at least doubled as a minimum. The help desk has a long way to go in becoming good as the problem is they hire generalists rather than train people in specialist areas. Email is a easy topic but actually quite complex at the same which is why it’s survived for so long as it’s able to adapt.

Regarding your comment below, too many recipients shouldn’t temporarily block your account, if you try with less than 49, it should work immediately

[Andy_N]

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@Stu_Bwrote:

As to your thid point, yes if the error message were changed to "too many recipients" that would be much more informative and helpful to the customers who have the problem. But that is not a complete solution. A limit on recipient numbers is obviously necessary but 50 is probably rather too constraining - many "personal" users with BT accounts may be volunteer committe members, etc, of small organisations who will need to communicaate with over 50 group members so will stumble into this problem. Furthermore, they will stumble in unknowingly because the existance of such a limit (and the limit value of 50) is no-where made clear when they sign up to a BT account. But worst of all, when people DO have this problem, the BT helpdesk teams are either not sufficiently trained to understand the problem, or are told instead to just blame it on Microsoft, etc.  The apparrent BT policy of trying to "pass the buck" (when there is in fact a very simple honest answer that could be given to the customer - e.g. "I'm very sorry, your BT account is fundamentlly limited to 50 recipients per email, if you send messages with more than 50 we temporarily block your account but it will restore itself in 24 hrs" -  seems to be the most appalling example of poor customer relations , bordering on total contempt for customers.

Why is BT so awful!

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I agree with you to a certain extent (though I thought the sending limit was 49 recipients, trying to send to 50 recipients on an email will fail).

The problem with BT is that they do not publish this figure, nor do they publish a daily limit.

There are bound to be users that are indeed members of groups that need to send communications to their friends, for example walking groups when a walk is changed or cancelled. Yes, facebook/twitter and other methods can be used - but that relies on all the members having that access, and also different people able to admin the information.

Email is the simplest method in this case.

Hotmail has 100 recipients, and 300 email daily limit. Gmail has similar (though might be 500), but different for webmail or mail client.

[Stu_B]

The limit may well be 49 rather than 50 - is 50 "max number that does work" or "min number that fails" - sounds like it is the latter? I now limit my distribution lists to about 40 to be safe but it is a pain to have to maintain several "sub-lists" of group members.

My problem arises not from a "reply all" scenario (we always send dustribution list emails as BCC  for GDPR reasons now anyway) but from writing a new email to a distribution list that exceeds the threshold. This certainly causes a 24 hr lockout of ALL email sending from that account (which in the past I frequently grossly exacerbated by repeated attempts to send to distrbutions that were above the critical size before I understood the nature of the problem).

[gg30340]

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@Stu_B wrote:

The limit may well be 49 rather than 50 - is 50 "max number that does work" or "min number that fails" - sounds like it is the latter? I now limit my distribution lists to about 40 to be safe but it is a pain to have to maintain several "sub-lists" of group members.

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The "bulk" email limit is 49 and if I remember correctly the daily limit is 500 emails or at least it was a few years back.

[gatehill]

The 49/50 limit has been around 3-4 years; prior to that I don't think there was a limit. However, when it WAS introduced, I found that by deleting the offending email in the outbox and rebooting WLM fixed the problem. Its annoying that one has to wait 24 hours for it to auto-clear.

I agree, BT's first level customer service reps should be aware of the issue and how it is resolved, rather than reporting it to level 2 who will "ring you back".

[Andy_N]

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@gatehillwrote:

The 49/50 limit has been around 3-4 years; prior to that I don't think there was a limit.

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Believe it or not, the previous limit was 100 around 10 years go or so (up until 2014ish). Before the 100 limit it was 200. That's when I can't recall what dates that applied from - and what was before that.

[LanguedocFox]

The first message in this thread has a link saying that the issue has been solved. Click the link, and it takes you to a message (around 6 or 8 posts in) which doesn't have a solution. There are now around 50 posts on this thread, and the problem is still there. There are also lots of other threads on the same subject, none with a solution.

Briefly, I had the same issue (421 - too many messages), and same useless response from BT support. The 'online chat' service ended with me being told that it's not BT's issue and the 'adviser' disconnected; I then spent 93 minutes on the phone talking to the support service, and being told again that it was not a problem with BT (it clearly was/is).

I was then advised (informally) that it might be best to wait for 24/48 hours and not attempt to send any emails during that time. I did this, and 48 hours later, I can send emails.

I'm stuck on a contract with BT that finishes in Janury 2020, when I shall find a new provider who will hopefully not have such an appalling attitude to its customers and customer service. Incidentally, the full name for this support forum is apparently "BTCare Community Forums". The 'Care' shows that someone in BT understands irony.