Mutt mail program sporadically delivering emails

Question

first of all, I have to say that this is completely my fault. I did a stupid thing. I sent myself the same email 10,000 times from a shell script. Out of curiosity, really. Who hasn't wondered how long it would take their computer to send 10,000 emails. Nobody? well, I did. About 600 of these came through within 5 minutes. Now, whenever I try to send one email from mutt, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't- but, when it does make it through, it's usually accompanied by another one or two of those 10,000 emails. Seems like they're still out there, floating around, waiting for me to send another email that they can piggyback on. I've tried sending mails to my own addresses from a few different email providers, and it's just as flaky every time, so I guess that mutt is the problem, rather than yahoo/gmail. is there anybody who has encountered a problem like this before, and can shed some light on what's going on? (Using mutt from a terminal on mac osx)

Answer 1

From my experience from sending e-mail marketing. I do not think that this is an issue with mutt. E-mail can take many different paths to get to your server, and if you are sending 10,000 more than likely a couple of issues could occur:

1. Your ip address and your sender e-mail address will get classed as spam.
2. Your sending so much traffic that some servers will just give up, and not send the e-mail.
3. Your ISP will see a lot of traffic and block you.
4. All the above.

When it comes to sending e-mail you really have to be careful because it can be a big pain to get taken off spam lists, and not to mention you can upset clients.

It's also always important to include an op-out link.

My advice is to take a break, and wait a day and you will see e-mails (that have not been dropped) appear over time. As long as they don't get classed as Spam, which I think a lot of them will do.