CDONTS and Mass Mailings

[Rexolio]

Hi...I have a script written with CDONTS where a client can go to a form, type out an email message, a subject and enter his email address and then send it to all of the other members in my SQL Database via CDONTS.

Basically, I create a loop pulling out each member and sending the message to them individually via CDONTS.

Today we started having problems with members of my company not receiving their emails. These emails are email forwards/aliases - not real email address. I can receive email on my company email address, which is not a forward, and they can received emails on their personal ISP addresses where their company email addresses are usually forwarded to, but not from the alias itself.

The guy who hosts my site is saying that someone is spamming people using his mail server, that he can see "a ton of connections with bogus email addresses" and that's slowing things down. He's saying that he's going to have to prevent it somehow (I guess he can disable our ability to send out mass emails even if its not really spam)

My question is this: How would that only affect email forwards/aliases? Does this mean that I will have to disable that feature for my clients? Does CDONTS use the hosting server's outgoing mail server (dumb quesiton I know because I'm sure it does). But then why wouldn't the sending person simply get a returned email sent back. I know this happens because I've done it.

I can't possibly verify every member's email addresses because there's over 20,000 of them.

HELP!!!!!!!!! I just want some information to combat by host in case he's looking for an easy answer and wants to limit what I'm able to provide for my members!!!

 

[Rexolio]

Sorry to make a long message longer...but my host just messaged me and said that he found "50,000 spams. 98mb to be exact."

If CDONTS sends out to a bogus email, will it really just sit on the mail server and slow things down? If it does that,why do some of my clients get "non-deliverable" emails returned to them. I'm totally fine with that happening and they're fine with it too. But I'm confused as to why they would get this message AND the emails sit on the server!!!

 

[yandso]

Well I can answer one question for you. Generally mail servers are set up so that if an attempt fails to send a email they are put in a file to try again, some severs will try to send the mail every hour or two for up to two days. Then if they still cannot send the mail they send it back if they can.

 

[bknepher]

I had a similar situation. We have about 10% of our mail addresses go bad each month. My solution was to buy a mail server and put sendmailnt on it. Even then, since many of our users connect via AOL, none of them were getting our monthly news until I added their name into the subject of the email. Once I did that, all went through. I still have to look at the badmail folder on the primary server periodically and clean it out.

If you have a LINUX box available you can test the email addresses for validity without actually sending anything. Great feature.