Emails with many BCC recipients do not return undeliverable errors?

[Mateo1041]

Hi everyone,

I recently created email list software in PHP for sending newsletters to our subscribers. When sending email to our newsletter recipients, emails average anywhere from 100 - 600 recipients in the BCC portion of the email that is sent out.

While this new PHP software works great (on a Linux server) and all emails are "delivered", we're finding that no undeliverable emails are being returned and some should be as they are bogus email addresses. Is there a reason for this? Is it because we're using the BCC field?

Thanks for any help that can be offered. The From and To email addresses are correct in the email that is sent.

- Matt.

 

[thedaver]

Frankly a recent trend in email management strategies is to NOT acknowledge unmatchable addresses for a domain when being hit with dictionary attack. Often the mail admin will either (i) Refuse SMTP for incoming mail with unknown recipients or (ii) will silently accept the email for unknown recipients and simply drop the message internally.

My impression is that BCC doesn't change how a server should respond to misaddressed mail, but admins can certainly tailor their systems.

I'm guessing someone else has an opinion as well.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[Mateo1041]

Thank you, thedaver. We had originally created a loop that included everyone in the TO portion of the email. But it took much longer than the BCC method where I only had to send the email once and the mail server took care of the rest.

Would the loop method work better with individual emails being sent to one person at a time (using TO)? It looks like mail servers would see this as being more legit.

These are all opt-in subscribers who signed up for our newsletters. I just want to make sure everyone receives the newsletters we send out.