Microsoft's Office365 Limits Emails To 500 Recipients

suraj.sun writes "ZDNet's Ed Bott warns small businesses that if you sign up with Microsoft's Office 365, make sure you read the fine print carefully as an obscure clause in the terms of service limits the number of recipients you're allowed to contact in a day, which could affect the business very badly. Office 365's small business accounts (P1 plan) are limited to 500 recipients per 24 hours and enterprise accounts are limited to 1500. That's a limitation of 500 recipients during a single day. And the limitation doesn't apply to unique recipients. It's not hard to imagine scenarios in which a small business can bump up against that number."

Welcome to cloud computing...

[syousef]

...where the customer is the commodity.

You really think outsourcing something as basic as being able to compose an email or a word processing document or spreadsheet is a good idea? The stupidity boggles the mind. Yeah, let's increase the number of ways you're always at the mercy of your service providers and see what that does for your "core business".

Lesson is don't be lazy. Unless it's a specialised service that requires something special or you really can live with outages, host it your damn self.

Crippleware is Apple's profit point.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to unlock the software from these limitations, please Upgrade your COPY of this software
to the full version.

This shit was only cool when Apogee did that, because it was already fully functional and awesome until we wanted to go more places with what we already had, but when Apple and others do that it's just a big turn-off because it's not fully functional and there are no timers in place to scale the rate at which the software executes or even spawn parallel threads. F-U Apple.

Oh this is Microsoft? Nevermind, that's their feature. Yay Microsoft, protecting us from spammers that might think of using their software's Send but probably get-around this limitation by a B/CC me knowing how Microsoft implements their restrictions at the UI rather than a ruleset.

Re:Well this is some artificial bullshit.

[interval1066]

If you're a spam cannon you're not using Office to blast those emails, if you have half a brain. A simple spam mill is using a linux MTA and a perl script connected to a MySQL db filled with culled email lists. This will have not effect on spam. I seriously doubt that's the intent with this stupid limitation.

Re:email is nearly dead anyways

[gnapster]

Are you still in Grade 5? The GP was obviously being facetious.

One long rambling post

[msobkow]

Didn't the old services like AOL used to restrict the number of messages you could send? I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall people complaining about something like that.

The first release of any service has to start with some sort of limitation on what users can do in order to throttle the service volume while they work out what users actual needs are and what it's really costing to serve those needs. But you have to start somewhere to get out the door.

I remember the same arguments being raised 20 years ago when people were shifting workloads from mainframes and VAXes to the new-fangled early Unix systems and PCs. Who in their right mind would risk losing it all to a disk crash? Unix systems are unreliable!

I don't agree with putting everything on the cloud myself, and I hate it's very name (it's nothing more than a geographically distributed server cluster -- nothing new to the international businesses I've programmed for over the years.) But I digress...

You can buy a software package, install it locally, do your own backups, and comfort yourself that you're in total control. Or you can choose to outsource your services and storage, sign up for a service level agreement, and let someone else take care of it. Either approach has risks, and it's up to the user or business to decide which are more important risks to cover.

Most businesses don't want a local tech support team -- it's not what their core business is. Sorry, but the glory days of hiding out in the office of a mom & pop business hacking away at the systems and software are coming to an end. Those jobs are being outsourced and serviced. Did you think programmers were immune to change?

I don't like it any more than anyone else. I enjoyed writing batch processing and other striaght forward C code, but the 4GLs and reporting tools hit the market and those jobs went away. So started working with Oracle and embedded SQL, eventually branching out into Oracle DBA work and performance tuning. Then the East Indian contractors moved in to the Florida market and cut the rates too low for survival, so I had to change "careers" again. I did Neuron Data GUI development until the technology died, and I had to change again. You can check my resume data at Masterbranch if you're really curious where it went from there.

Life is change. You don't get a choice about whether you adapt -- the world will change with or without your approval.

Re:spam control

[Dunbal]

Other people are free to reach their own conclusions, and decide for themselves what to think about a post with a "$" inserted in it. How about you grow up? No one elected you as a fucking censor.