Hi By mistake i wrote a script which used a forloop and accumulated all the email in the headers, so i sent 1 email to 700 recipients. One email was sent, but because i designed the script incorrectly and placed if statement in the wrong place, that 1 email that was sent had 700 recipients in the 'TO' headers. One of these recipients email addresses was my own. My mail account did not receive that test email message but some did. I am assuming not so many because I did not receive many angry replies (except 2 so far) The hosting company is not very helpful in helping me to determine which recipients would have received the test message, they also don't want to tell me if there are any server configs that control it. 1st question: How is that possible that some recipients received that email and some did not. 2nd question: Because the recipients that received the email can see protected email addresses of my other customers, what should I do to fix it? What could be the worst and best scenario consequences of something like this happening? 3rd question: The hsoting company tech told me that they allow 100 emails per hour. If the 1 mail message was sent to 700 recipients (1 call to mail function) would the server treat that as 1 or as 700 mails? I am assuming they are running apache.
Very risky sending emails from your own hosting account. I had one hosting account shut down because spam enmails were being sent by somebody who hacked in - now I have had 50 sites shut down for over a month. The hosting company say their servers got flagged as spammers. My advise would be to use an autoresponder service - such as Aweber, and let them handle that sort of hassle. Luckily I took Jim Edwards advice and so have no problems sending emails to my lists.
Honestly, host is the least of my worries. The email addresses exposed is my biggest worry. After all they trusted me by providing their email addresses. I am just hoping that the server blocked it on time and just few received that mail message. That's why I am trying to determine how the server most likely would handle such a script mail...