This page is about the sending limits when sending emails in seppmail.cloud (or why you can't send an infinite number of emails).

Sections on this page:

• Goals of the seppmail.cloud rate limits
  • SPAM is a No-Go
  • Everything plays together
  • Why is it bad to send repeatedly to unknown or unverified users?
  • Why is it bad to be listed in a real-time block list (RBL)?
  • What is a spam trap and what is its typical life cycle?
• Extract from the SLAs on the subject of email dispatch
  • Legend / Glossary
  • Outbound rate limits and rules

 

Goals of the seppmail.cloud rate limits

The rate limit of the seppmail.cloud has four objectives that ensure your email delivery in the long term.

• Equal utilisation: So that every user on our shared platform can send their emails fairly without anyone taking up all the bandwidth for themselves. Think of it like a well-organised party - everyone should get something from the buffet.
• Good reputation: We want to ensure that our broadcasting infrastructure is trusted on the global Internet. "Don't worry, we're the good guys!"
• Consideration: We respect the sending limits of our customers and third parties to avoid message congestion. After all, we don't want your emails to disappear into digital nirvana.
• Reliability: We measure and report delivery times using statistically proven methods to ensure that your messages arrive on time. It sounds complicated, but it simply means that we go to great lengths to make sure your emails arrive on time.

SPAM is a No-Go

As all our customers send emails via the same sending platform, we pay very close attention to whether unwanted emails are sent from our systems. Emails containing SPAM in particular are a sign of particularly "bad behaviour" for email service providers like us. Therefore:

Everything plays together

Our team keeps an eye on the sending patterns, both automatically and manually. If someone violates our rules or jeopardises the platform, we intervene. This can mean temporarily or permanently blocking messages to protect the sender, recipient and all other customers.

We are like the friendly but strict bouncers of an exclusive club.

The rate limits are dynamic and can influence each other. So if you have too many bounce-back emails, it could reduce the rate at which we accept your emails. It's a bit like a dance - sometimes one step influences the next.

We hope this helps you to better understand the rate limits - it's a responsible way of working together.

Why is it bad to send repeatedly to unknown or unverified users?

It is an indicator of poor address data maintenance or a hacked mailbox.

Sending to many unknown recipients indicates that the user may also be sending to spam traps or other addresses that are no longer valid (just because a server accepts it doesn't mean it will still reach the original human recipient). What is a bounce today may be a spam trap tomorrow. Sending too many emails to a spam trap can result in our systems being listed on public lists (in the jargon Realtime-BlockList, RBL) as a "SPAM slinger".

As you can see, a well-maintained address list is not only valuable because you have your customer data under control, but also because it protects all of our transmission infrastructure and keeps the Internet "cleaner".

Why is it bad to be listed in a real-time block list (RBL)?

RBLs are lists of untrustworthiness and unreliability. Anyone who ends up on an RBL is considered untrustworthy and many other email systems will not accept emails from these senders. This means that emails to legitimate recipients, such as your business contacts, are then rejected by the recipient system.

This is often not even noticed, as emails are not actually rejected, but are quarantined on the recipient side. The administrator or a user then has to decide whether the email is wanted, which delays delivery.

The cause of the listing on an RBL can sometimes be difficult to determine, so it is time consuming and costly to find and fix the cause of poor deliverability. Sometimes a single misdirected email is enough to block a sender's domain or a platform provider's IP address. If the platform provider is listed, this affects all of their customers and effectively impacts the business.

Therefore, it is important that seppmail.cloud does not end up in an RBL, and you can help!

What is a spam trap and what is its typical life cycle?

A spam trap is created as a regular email address that accepts and usually sends desired emails that are read by a human. At some point, the address is deleted or abandoned (for example, if an employee leaves the company, the company closes, a customer changes ISP, etc.). The mailbox then fills up or is deleted and no longer accepts emails, resulting in the email being rejected. Sometimes an internal spam or malware researcher discovers that this address is still receiving emails and reactivates it. From then on, every email sent to that address is considered spam and reported to internal or external spam filters.

A spam trap is therefore an email address of a former employee that is deliberately left active in order to catch and classify spam.

Extract from the SLAs on the subject of email dispatch

Legend / Glossary

Here some term definitions we use below:

• Temporary reject: The sending server will retry delivery until the end of the configured message queue lifetime (typically configured by the partner or provider between 48 hours and 5 days). Messages will continue to be processed by the seppmail.cloud platform, but possibly with a lower priority. An aggressive retry strategy by the sending infrastructure can escalate temporary rejections to final rejections and we don't want that. We therefore try to carefully deliver the emails later.
• Hard reject: The sending server will immediately return the message to the sender with a non-delivery notification. We therefore no longer try to deliver the message later, but give up immediately for good reasons. The reasons are listed in the table below.
• Service for mass mails: There are special service providers that can send mass emails. This is very suitable for newsletters and similar emails with more than 100 recipients or a constant recipient list and high frequency and repetition. Do not attempt to send mass emails via the seppmail.cloud platform, it is not suitable for this.
• Spam trap recipient: A spam trap recipient is a special email address set up by anti-spam organisations or internet service providers to identify and combat spammers. These email addresses are usually not publicly accessible and are not used for legitimate communication purposes. Instead, they are used as traps to recognise unwanted emails. As a user, you should never send emails to such addresses.

Outbound rate limits and rules

The send limits described should be far above the usual values for normal email traffic and only take effect if unusual situations occur. As already mentioned in the examples, this can have the following reasons:

• A single email account has been hacked and someone is using it to send unsolicited emails.
• One of your employees uses your and our infrastructure to cause damage.
• Your entire company is being or has been hacked.

You see, these limitations help us all to keep the world of email a safe and stable place where we can rely on this technology.