Maximum number of email recipients?

[KayGeeBee]

I sent an email to 22 recipients and my email account became locked and I had to change my password. The email was to other members of a charity committee on which I sit and we were discussing a topic by email. I had been sent an email with 22 recipients and I simply did a reply-all to send my reply. 

What is the maximum number of recipients that an email can have before a virgin media email account is locked? 

I eventually had to send the email by gmail which worked fine (and that is free!).

Once I had changed the password I then got an email saying that my mailbox had been locked due to suspected malware. Not much use sending that email to me when my mailbox was locked as I couldn't see it!!!!! I have anti-virus on all my devices and they all say they are clean.

I suspect the locking was caused by 22 recipients on my email which looked like spam to the server? This needs to be fixed as I need to be able to communicate with all my other committee members! How do I get a permanent fix so that this doesn't happen again?

[Graham_A · Accepted solution]

@KayGeeBee  Virgin Media do not detail the exact limits of the number of recipients you can email in a single email.  However, 22 is below the limit when using an email client.  The limit is considerably higher when using VM webmail.

If you do exceed the limit the error message should contain a specific VM error code that can be checked and the block is time limited and does not require a password change to resolve. 

The fact that your email account was completely locked suggests that this was for a different reason than the number of emails sent.

[Laureen325]

The BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) method is the most common approach to send emails to multiple recipients at the same time. Emailing to multiple recipients using the BCC feature hides other recipients from the recipient, making it look like he is the sole recipient of the email.

[KayGeeBee]

Thanks. That is useful information. If it wasn't 22 recipients that caused the issue then I wonder what it was.

I did ring 150 twice and received two different answers, neither helpful, and a promise that IT support would call me which they didn't (or at least didn't leave a message to say that they had).

On the day that it happened VM had warned of disruption in the area due to improvement work. I expected this to be for broadband, phone and/or TV, but they remained active all day as far as I could tell. I can't think how their improvement work would have lead to them locking my email due to supposed malware.

I may never know the cause then unless VM tells me something useful.

Thanks again.

[KayGeeBee]

I am familiar with Bcc thanks. That isn't useful in a committee setting though where it is necessary to copy everyone on the committee with your reply and for them to be able to do a reply-all to add their comments to the discussion. Using Bcc makes it impossible for them to reply-all to the whole committee.

[Laureen325]

The Outlook recipient limit for a single email is 500 people. This restricts the To, Cc, and Outlook Bcc limit. The maximum number of email addresses you can put in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields is 500   Surge Card Info