Bromcom Email Limits

[Norbert]

Anyone else get the email today about the Bromcom email limits? What a backward step this is.

 

Anyhow - we have an on-prem Exchange server and our MX records point at Google (we use GSuite for Education here) - all incoming mail comes into Google then routed to our Exchange Server. All outbound mail is sent via Google's servers as well which is set up as a smarthost on our Exchange server.

 

Given the Bromcom announcement today, I'm looking for the best way of using either our Exchange server or, preferably, our GSuite GMail servers. Any pointers before I go wading in and trying this out for myself?

 

Ta.

[Norbert]

Further to this, I've just had a really helpful call from the Bromcom helpdesk team and I'll be in a good position to try out a couple of possible solutions shortly. Well worth logging the call with them if you have any concerns.

[Norbert]

For anyone else trying to set this up I have had to move the account that I am using for this into its own Google Organization and allow access to less secure apps for that Organization. It worked to a point until Google started blocking the traffic as it was being accessed by what it deemed to be a less secure app.

[djrscally]

What's the deal with the email limits then?

[Redwinegirl]

3000 emails (regardless of size of school) -we send over 50,000 a month..... Our email system apparently won't cope with this (365). Anyone got any solutions I can point our IT manager in as he doesn't have any ideas? and this could be costly!!!

Nothing like short notice!!!!

[djrscally]

You send 50,000 emails through your MIS every month!?

[Michael]

I guess if you had 3000 students and 17 e-mails were sent per month, you would be sending 51,000 e-mails. I guess it also depends what other components you're using of the MIS.

 

What I'm unclear about however is I specify O365's mail relay: outlook.office365.com so I can't see why they'd need to be any upper limit. It should be unlimited (within reason)!

[Shadow_Walker]

3000 emails (regardless of size of school) -we send over 50,000 a month..... Our email system apparently won't cope with this (365). Anyone got any solutions I can point our IT manager in as he doesn't have any ideas? and this could be costly!!!

Nothing like short notice!!!!

Office 365 has limits to how many emails can be sent per hour (or minute). Had a similar issue at my last school and had to use a different smtp relay to get it working. We did have to pay for a different smtp though.

 

EDIT: 30 messages per minute seems to be the limit

Edited May 8, 2018 by Shadow_Walker

[jslate1980]

Office 365 has limits to how many emails can be sent per hour (or minute). Had a similar issue at my last school and had to use a different smtp relay to get it working. We did have to pay for a different smtp though.

 

EDIT: 30 messages per minute seems to be the limit

 

What relay did you end up using?

[matt40k]

Office 365 has limits to how many emails can be sent per hour (or minute). Had a similar issue at my last school and had to use a different smtp relay to get it working. We did have to pay for a different smtp though.

 

EDIT: 30 messages per minute seems to be the limit

 

I thought that was a "soft" limit - ie you contact support and they up it?

[Falls]

Anyone got this up and running yet? Would be interested on settings if anyone's willing to share. We're O365.

 

thanks

[ajp233]

smtp.office365.com

Port 587

SSL Enabled (STARTTLS)

[Falls]

thanks @ajp233

[themightymrp]

There is an FAQ available from Bromcom on their support site available here:

 

https://support.bromcom.com/UploadedFiles/Software%20Products/e-Contact/Bromcom%20eMail%20FAQs.pdf

[Falls]

Thanks @themightymrp I read the above document but have been having problems getting it to work, so just thought I'd post to check the settings I'm using are correct.

[themightymrp]

This is how ours looks - we just created a Bromcom@ email address under our O365 tenancy

 

 

We've been using this since day 1 for us (September 2017) and we send A LOT of emails!!!

 

Also worth noting, the following changes are coming to O365 SMTP settings which I queried with support:

 

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2018/04/20/changes-coming-to-the-smtp-authenticated-submission-client-protocol/

 

They've answered with the following:

 

You won't be affected directly in Bromcom. We will always continue to try sending emails, but if you are using a single account for multiple applications, or more than 3 people try to send email from MIS, then some messages will get rejected according to article. An example of this is if you have more than 3 scheduled reports set to run at the same time to email out reports, this will create 3 concurrent connections to the mail server and this will get rejected so I advise that you ensure your scheduled reports that email out to staff are all set to run at different times. The only other situation this could cause you problems is if you use the same mailbox with Bromcom and other applications as if Bromcom tries to connect to the mail server as well as the other applications at the same time creating 3 or more concurrent connections, it will also reject the emails. Other than that, you should see no effect.

Edited May 14, 2018 by themightymrp

[themightymrp]

For informations sake, since April 14th we have sent just shy of 8000 emails using Bromcom - and that's just the ones for Students! We have various reports configured to email to staff too

[themightymrp]

We also have a few other email accounts set up within Office 365 for specific uses within Bromcom. For example, we have a DoNotReply@ address set up as well as a sixthform@ address.

 

If you go into the Exchange Admin centre of O365 and then go to Mailbox Delegation for each of these accounts, all you have to do is add the Bromcom@ email address (in our example) into the 'Send As' permission and you can have messages sent from different areas of the system using the one SMTP settings in Bromcom

 

So in the Communication module of Bromcom, go to Maintenance --> Configuration and we have entered DoNotReply@ as the school email. Also, when sending an email within the Communication module, you can edit the 'From' email address to be any of the other ones you set up in this way (sixthform@) and so on.

 

 

EDIT - We added an automatic reply message to the DoNotReply email address in O365 to say it wasn't a monitored Inbox.

Edited May 14, 2018 by themightymrp

[Falls]

Thanks for all the info, much appreciated.

[themightymrp]

No problem. I think Bromcom support cringe when they hear us phoning up now as our SLT took the approach of "lets run before we can walk". We've done quite a lot with the system in a short space of time but I can almost feel the tears come on when I say which school I'm calling from Hahaha

[sahilkhan]

hi

has anyone been able to setup this for Gsuite which allows upto 10000 emails,

i am having issues to get Gsuite smtp to work with bromcom.

[Bromcom_Support]

Hi Sahikhan

 

If you still need assistance with this please give our support team a call, I am sure we can help you out.

[Norbert]

We are still struggling to get this working. The biggest problem is the randomness of it. Test messages send OK but sending out bulk messages is so hit and miss. Some send, others don't with no real pattern, rhyme or reason. I'm currently looking at an alternative SMTP feed to try and get this all working.

[Bromcom_John]

@Norbert I recommend you contact the support team who will be able to assist you directly.

[Norbert]

I have an ongoing call with this issue. Things are just getting a little stressed here with no reliable method of communicating with parents via email from Bromcom.