Thunderbird email app

[Leesha]

Hi,
I have a database that sends out 1500 emails one time a month when they are doing their billing. This is done from access through Outlook and has worked fine for years. Now they have a new server and hosting company and they have limits on how many can go out per day. They are asking whether the invoices can be auto emailed out through an app called Thunderbird?
Thanks,
Leesha

[HansV]

Mozilla Thunderbird does not have VBA and you cannot control it from Access the way you can control Outlook, so I fear it's impossible.

[ChrisGreaves]

... they have limits on how many can go out per day.

Leesha, to what and/or how are these limits applied?
Per user? Per session? Per hour? It may be possible to split that workload into smaller portions? It's worth asking.
Cheers, Chris

[Leesha]

Thanks Hans and Chris, you've saved me a lot to time trying something that won't work. RE limits by microsoft, apparently there is a limit of 1000/day of the same email going out. After the first 1000 go out, the rest continue to process but are returned. Their option is to send a second batch the next day or send them from a different computer. Currently they send them all from a generic email address that all staff check during the day/month.
Leesha

[Gasman]

Investigate using CDO

https://isladogs.co.uk/email-tester/index.html

[George Hepworth]

At one point, when I was still actively consulting, we ran into a similar issue with what mass emailers called "flood control". That is a colorful name for preventing spammers from sending millions of junk email messages out every day. I assume that term is still in use.

Unfortunately, like many things, bad actors invoke a response that creates headaches for the small-time users who only need to send out a couple thousands invoices once a month. It depends on the size of the "flood" involved; some email hosts have smaller pipes to let the flood through.

Our solution was to use CDO, as suggested by Gasman. It took a few hours of configuration and testing, but the client was back in business.


I should add that the last thing your company wants to do is get on a black-list of "known spammers" who are blocked by many responsible email hosts.
https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

[BobH]

Hmmm!

Someone smarter than I am will probably know the answer.

I wonder how MS ids a sender to determine the source? If they use IP address, would using a VPN, assuming the VPN uses a different IP address when one chooses a different location (city), solve the problem?

[ChrisGreaves]

Now they have a new server and hosting company and they have limits on how many can go out per day.

I am still not sure of what the Real Problem is.

Right now I get the feeling that Management made a decision to switch client&server and hosting company, and it is the sever+hosting company that impose the limit on how many (similar) emails can be sent out in any 24-hour period.
I assume too that the suppliers have clever software that won't be tricked by adding a unique identifier (such as an incremented number) to each outgoing email.

If my feelings are correct, then one solution would be to scrap the new supplier and revert to the original system; but knowing what I do of management they are not likely to roll back the system.

If that is the case then the business has to learn to live with this limitation.

Presumably you-all have considered carving a 1,500 batch of emails into (say) three daily batches of 500 emails each.

The little I know of CDO suggests that CDO had better be pretty good at slipping right past the new supplier; that is, CDO would need to be a solution that is 100% independent of any service or facility provided by the new supplier.

Please and thank you: How close am I to understanding the problem?

A second train of thought running in my mind is "From whence the suggestion about Thunderbird?". Who came up with that idea, and on what foundation? Whoever suggested Thunderbird may know something we don't know. There again, it may just be someone who heard someone else talk about Thunderbird over the lunch table one day ... but I would track down the source of that rumour before discarding it out of hand. Everything I ever learned in computing was something I didn't know about before I learned about it!

Cheers, Chris

[Gasman]

Now they have a new server and hosting company and they have limits on how many can go out per day.

Cracking management, moving to a supplier that at the very start, is unable to satisfy current business needs.

I worked at one place where they gave my team leader a project to find new software for a particular task.
In a pub, one of the directors was persuaded to buy some software which 'will do all that and more'

Well of course it did not, and was scrapped.

However the director was man enough (are we stilled allowed to say that? ), to admit that and apologise to my team leader and told her to carry on with the project.

[ChrisGreaves]

Cracking management, moving to a supplier that at the very start, is unable to satisfy current business needs.

:ROTFWPR:⁽¹⁾
Cheers, Chris
⁽¹⁾ "Roll On The Floor While Parallel Running"
Am I paranoid, or did IT (what used to be Data Processing before the overpaid charlatans took over) really decide that Parallel Running of a proposed new system was not valuable (instead of being invaluable, as this thread suggests). C

[Leesha]

Their IT asked about using Thunderbird. I asked whether they are using a third party supplier to obtain the MS 365 and they said no. That limits are set directly by MS.

[SpeakEasy]

> Now they have a new server and hosting company

In other words you now have a new email gateway. It is the gateway that imposes the restrictions. Moving your email client to Thunderbird, even if you could automate it, would still use that gateway, so the restrictions would still apply.

The suggestion of using CDO will suffer the same problem - you need to point it at a gateway ...

One workaround is to write your own minimalist gateway, which can be done to a certain extent with CDO. Basically you need to do an MX lookup (although this isn't particularly straightforward with VBA, easiest route is to call the commandline nslookup command)for each email recipient, and use the result as the SMTP host in the CDO config

All that being said, Microsoft's 365 Business Premium service should easily handle 1500 emails per month. Your only problem is that you can only send to a maximum of 500 recipients in one email - so just batch your 1500 into 3 emails of 500 (as per ChrisGreaves above)