I setup a new Gmail address for a customer a couple of weeks ago and used POP to allow her to use Outlook Express like she was used to with her old address. In less than 2 days, she called and said that her password was being rejected and she couldn’t send or receive email.
I hurried over and logged into the web interface with her credentials, but was also rejected. On the second attempt, it required me to answer a captcha and her secret question before logging me in to her account. After doing so, I checked the POP settings in Outlook Express and sent a test message to myself and back to her. Test successful and I left.
Two days go by, and she called me again. Perplexed, I made my way back to her house and repeated the same steps as I just described. Gmail normally does not require a user to decode a captcha and answer the secret question, but I chalked it up to something temporary or an anomaly in her account. I was able to get her email flowing again and left puzzled, but satisfied that it was working again.
Less than 24 hours later, she called again! Same problem.
This time, I dug a little deeper. I got lucky because she had an email stuck in the Outbox of Outlook Express. It was a message with a huge movie attachment she was forwarding to her entire address book. This time, when I logged into the account on the web, I discovered a lot of returned messages from Gmail saying the address was rejected. Gmail provided a link to this page which basically states that Gmail sees new users who send massive amount of email to multiple people at the same time as spam. When it does so, it temporarily disables the account…thus the requirement of answering the captcha and secret question.
After clearing everything up again for her, I instructed her to not forward email at all or to no more than 4-5 people at a time. That was almost a week ago. Problem solved.
Not sure about G-mail, but I have a POP/Outlook MSN account through Qwest and was having a similar problem although I was not sending mail to EVERYONE in my contacts, but a large number of them. Got an error message and called them up. They explained that they had a limit of e-mails that could be sent in a day and if you sent even 1 E-mail with multiple addresses, they add those together and count them ALL. After talking with the rep and assuring him that I was NOT a spammer, they increased my limit, almost double. No problems since.
Thanks for feedback. I hope you are at least using BCC, though.
Great solution. Now can you go ahead and see that everybody else on the planet has to pick no more than 5 people to email at a time. That would be GREAT. Thanks!
Why would anyone try to send a movie to their entire mailbox? It would look like spam to me too
Happens all the time. By movie, I mean those short .wmv files. Even a 2 minute video can mean a 10 or more megabyte file.
Yes, I ALWAYS use Bcc! In addition I have AVG scanning e-mails in and out bound, as well as a couple other programs looking at items. I know that’s no guarantee, but it helps keep things “clean”. I also delete all the other e-mail addresses after hitting forward. I hate getting an e-mail with 40,000 other folks addresses on it. I work on several friends computers and encourage them to not forward addresses also.
Good job Dave! You are a model forwarder. Others need to follow your good habits. I salute you!
I have been using Google web standard edition.
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