Google: Sending Email to Large Audiences

Overview

Sending an email to a large number of people can have certain negative effects:

• There is a greater chance of recipients reporting your email to Google as spam. If Google marks your account for sending spam, it could impede the delivery of future emails you send.
• Google has limits on the number of recipients that can be on a single email. It also has limits on the number of emails sent and received in a day. If you reach the limit, you will no longer receive or be able to send email for the rest of the day.

Below are some tips to help avoid these situations.

Create an MCommunity Group

Add the email recipients to an MCommunity group. Sending an email to an MCommunity group counts as one email, no matter how many members are in it. This will help to keep you under you daily limit of emails.

Use a Shared Account

By sending the email from a shared Google account, it won’t be be delivered from your own account. This will help prevent your own account from being flagged by Google as having sent spam. We can always change a shared account if it gets flagged, but changing your own account is a much more complex and time consuming process.

Send With On-Premise SMTP Mail

To bypass the Google daily email limit, you can send the email using U-M’s outgoing SMTP server and a client like Outlook or Thunderbird. This is done in addition to using a Google shared account. The Google at U-M support team will need to set a second password for the shared account that does not use Single Sign On (SSO). When requesting a shared account, indicate in the notes that you plan to use the account to send email using U-M’s outgoing SMTP server.

Note The SSO password and non-SSO password should be synced to avoid confusion. The need to use the non-SSO password is rare, so there is a chance that the SSO password may have changed. If the password you use for the shared account does not work, contact the ITS Service Center.

Step 1: Enable IMAP on the Mail Account

1. Sign in to the shared account’s mail.
2. Click the gear in the top right.
3. Select Settings.
4. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
5. Select Enable IMAP.
6. Click Save Changes.

Note This setting is not available while using the basic HTML view of mail. To enable IMAP, use the standard view instead. Find out more about standard view and basic HTML view.

Step 2: Set Up Your Mail Client

Use these values to update your email client information:

Incoming Mail (IMAP) Server:

• imap.gmail.com
• Requires SSL: Yes
• Port: 993

Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server:

• smtp.mail.umich.edu
• Use Authentication: Yes - Password
• Port for SSL: 587
• Requires SSL: Yes

Account Name or User Name: shared account full address (including @umich.edu)

Email Address: shared account full address (including @umich.edu)

Password: Provided by the Google at U-M support team