Gmail rejects emails with bcc addresses

[Gren]

I am involved with a local residents group and have been sending newsletter emails to our primary gmail address and members' addresses bcc'd (about 120). Gmail has suddenly begun rejecting these emails as they could be spam.
Is there any way of getting around this? It's a breach of members' confidentiality to send emails showing everyone's address.
Sorry if this is an inappropriate question for this Forum.

 

[chscag]

Moved here to apps and games. (Mail is an app not other hardware.)

That's something you'll need to take up with Google customer service. Your posts would very easily look like spam with all those addresses as bcc. You probably need to use another service such as "Mail Chimp" or the like as they deal with mail going out to large numbers of addressees. Most companies that send out newsletters use that type of service.

 

[lclev]

I had the same issue at work with our mail server. My boss has to sent out the same email to 300+.

We looked into services but we couldn't justify the cost given we were only looking at four times a year.

What we had to do involved using Outlook and creating groups. All the addresses have to be in Outlook's address book. If that is of interest to you let me know. We are using Outlook 2013 (Windows) and we found there is a difference between versions. It will send the emails one at a time which got us past the spam issue.

Lisa

 

[chscag]

I was going to suggest what Lisa gave you, however, Outlook is not inexpensive and the new version for the Mac (part of the Office 365 package for the Mac) is now available. It would be a one time purchase though - but you'll have to wait until September when it's released along with a stand alone Office 2016 suite for the Mac.

 

[chas_m]

It may not actually be Gmail, it might be your ISP flagging the email because of the high number of recipients (I mean, how is a machine supposed to know the difference between a local club newsletter and spam?).

Try sending the email with, let's say, members who's last names start with A and B only (probably only a dozen or so?). If that goes, then its probably your ISP, but of course Google is also mindful of spammers and so may be blocking such a high recipient count.

 

[Slydude]

If you choose to send the e-mails in groups that can also be done using Contacts. Set up However many groups you need so that there are say 10 - 20 people per group. Keep the number small in case the ISP has a small limit on the number that can go out at one time.

Then go to Mail and create the e-mail as usual. In the To: field enter the name of one of the groups and send as usual.

 

[Gren]

Problem solved

Thanks everybody, I had a reply from someone on the Google forum who recommended that I reduce the bcc addresses to fewer than 100 and that worked. A nuisance as I now have to send each email twice but at least they're being sent.

It was definitely Google that was rejecting the message with more than 100 bccs in their effort to reduce spam sent by Gmail.