What follows is IT's generic advice and information on administrative bulk email with additional information and documentation links.
Detailed Information
Warning: Google forbids the use of Gmail for bulk mailing and has relatively low limits for the number or pieces of email you can send from an account and if you exceed them, your Gmail account can be locked out of sending any mail for up to 24 hours. Under no circumstances should you try to send bulk email using Gmail. This includes using mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird to send bulk mail via Gmail's SMTP relay.
- You can do this with an ad-hoc listserv list where you upload the list of email addresses to listserv and then send the email.
- You can also do this sort of thing using a mail merge program (IT cannot recommend a particular program), and in that case there is no limit as long as you don't customize the mail per user (that is, you send the same mail file to many users). Many mail merge programs support this. If you send individual emails to each user, you will be limited to sending a few thousand per hour.
- Another method is to use a commercial email sender like Constant Contact, Emma, Mailchimp, etc.
Gmail Sending limits: The limits are documented at this link and may change without notice.
- Additional detailed information on administrative bulk email use/sending can be found at this link.
- Facilities and additional options for sending bulk mail (Faculty/Staff) can be found at this link.
Environment
Web-based email service(s)
Risk
Anti-spam measures users may employ that can affect administrative bulk email:
Greet Pause
This inserts a five-second pause between the time a connection is made to our mail relays and when they respond with the initial greeting. Some spam-sending programs don't wait for the greeting and start sending right away (so-called spam cannons). When this is happens, our mail servers close the connection avoiding a significant amount of spam. Most mail servers open a connection and send all the mail they have queued through the single connection so mail is not significantly delayed. However, we have seen software being used by some departments that opens a new connection for each mail file sent rather than the better practice of opening a single connection. This can lead to it taking a very long time to send a large batch of email. If the program cannot be fixed or replaced, the connection rate limit can be overridden by adding the NM tag mail.greetpause to the host entry of the machine used to send the email. A value of 0 will turn off the greet pause.
Client Connection Rate Limit
This limits the number of connections per minute from a given IP address. This protects our mail servers from being swamped by huge numbers of incoming connections and can slow down the incoming rate of spam emails. We have exceptions in place for our own mail relays and for those we receive a lot of email from (Google, Microsoft, Qualtrics, etc.). Bulk mail programs that open a new connection for each email rather than sending all mail down a single connection may hit this limit. Some especially poorly written email programs may not be able to handle the return codes from the mail server that say, try again later, and fail. If these programs cannot be replaced or reconfigured, the connection rate limit can be overridden by adding the NM tag mail.clientrate to the host sending the email. The value of the tag is in connections per minute.