The email sending limit varies across various hosts, ranging from per minute to hourly and even daily. Knowing the exact limits in the case of each host ensures that you do not go beyond these limits when sending emails as part of your email campaigns.
This article will discuss the sending limits of top email service providers out there so that you do not get blocked while using them. Among others, we will be touching GoDaddy, Office 365, and Gmail.
Why Should You Know These Limits?
You must know the limits of your email service provider, especially when you are sending your cold emails via tools that use your personal SMTP. Most times, your provider limits the number of emails you can send per day, even if the sending tool does not. So, if you end up sending more than the limit, your email account may be blocked for a specific period – 24 hours or more.
Knowing the limits helps you to plan your delivery time and frequency accordingly. This would boost your chances of a successful campaign, especially if you backed it up with email content of excellent quality with sufficient personalization.
Remember that sending actual spams or messages perceived as spams by your prospective recipients will only get you blocked by your email service provider. So avoid spams and ensure your emails have remarkable deliverability to avoid getting blocked.
Also, note that the limit, as set by your provider, applies to every message you are sending through your address. Hence, in campaigns where you have several follow-up emails, they end up piling up in the queue, alongside your first touch emails. If not properly planned, this may lead to the overlapping of the scheduled types of emails, thus forcing you to exceed the limits. The same outcome applies to a situation where you use the same email address to send a few campaigns concurrently.
What Are the Limits?
Now, let us look into the limits of each email service provider.
Free Gmail
The daily limit here is 100 messages via SMTP or 500 emails via a browser. While there is no official hourly limit, you should stick to 20 messages per hour if yours is a free Gmail account.
Exceeding the limits above will result in temporary blocking of your account, for 1-24 hours. While it may be tempting to send cold email campaigns using a free Gmail account, you are better off with an address on a different domain through G-Suite. G-Suite offers more flexibility as per sending settings and higher outreach volume.
Also, sending your emails via an address with a business domain portrays you as a serious sender to your recipients. If, for any reason, you end up with the free Gmail account option, always set up the address to appear clean and safe to your recipients.
In addition to the quantity, you must focus on the quality of our outreach. If the content of your emails is poor in quality with zero deliverability, you may be flagged and subsequently blocked by your email provider. In this case, you are being penalized for quality rather than exceeding the limits.
G-Suite (Google Apps for Business)
The daily limit here is 2000 messages or 500 (if you are on a trial account). There are no official hourly limits yet.
The penalty for exceeding the limit is a temporarily blocked account, lasting about 24 hours. The conditions here are somewhat similar to what is obtainable in the Free Gmail option. Google prioritizes both quality and quantity. So, in addition to avoiding sending too many emails, ensure that your email copy contains no broken links, spam words, or HTML-to-text rate. Personalization is also crucial.
Google is always quick to block once its anti-spam robots flag you for any reason. For Google, there is no better way to prevent spam than ensuring that people do not get to send spam at all. Note that the limits do not go from 500 to 2000 automatically when you upgrade your account from trial to premium. The upgrade is gradual, and it takes time.
Office365
The daily limit here is 10,000 recipients. Again, the hourly limit is not officially stated, but users have speculated a limit per minute, i.e., a maximum of 30 messages.
To be on the safe side, ensure that you do not get any close to Office365’s daily limit. Sending 10,000 emails in 24 hours is not an indication of quality email outreach. However, you are more likely to fall for the limit per minute. The risk is even higher if your outbound campaigns run on any form of an automaton.
Your sending medium may help in keeping to the limits. But if it does not, you need the frequency of sending manually. Office365 also frowns at email content of poor quality. In fact, it prompts blocking faster than exceeding limits. This provider prioritizes your deliverability - a low delivered/sent ratio portrays you as a spammer and increases your chances of being blocked.
So, keep your deliverability at a decent level, and your content quality somewhat high.
NEOSERV
NEOSERV started with web hosting & domain name registration in 2003, and that is one of the most reliable web hosting providers in EU. On all packages, for protection against automated sending of SPAM messages, the sending limit is set to 30 messages per hour. The subscriber can set these restrictions independently in his subscriber center. Restrictions can be released to the following values:
- 50 messages / h (WHITE package),
- 100 messages / h (ORANGE package),
- 300 messages / h (GREEN package),
- 500 messages / h (BLUE package),
- 500 messages / h (RED package),
- 200 messages / h (Reseller packages),
- 300 messages / h (M-START package),
- 500 messages / h (M1 package),
- 500 messages / h (M2 package),
- 1,000 messages / h (M3 package),
- 1,000 messages / h (M4 package),
- 1,000 messages / h (TURBO package).
With more than 18 years of experience and more than 2.000 positive reviews, it is clear that NEOSERV is an extremely reliable hosting provider. Among the reviews, we can most often see compliments related to quick-response technical support, lightning-fast SSD servers and affordable prices.
GoDaddy (Workspace Email Accounts)
The daily limit here is 250 recipients, upgradable to 500 for an additional fee. The hourly limit is set at 300 messages max and 200 messages per minute.
Campaigns with automatic follow-ups are at a greater risk of reaching the daily limit. There are two ways to avoid this. The first option is to schedule your messages within all your campaigns for different days of the week. Alternatively, send your emails from multiple email addresses, such that there is no overlap between your follow-ups and first touch emails. Without any overlap, you will not be blocked from sending.
Your sending tool may help you to avoid limit per minute, considering that they limit the number of messages you can send in a minute. Another important tip is to set up your delivery hours smartly. For example, you will most likely hit the hourly limit if you send your campaign to over 300 prospects after setting a single-hour window.
Rackspace
The daily limit here is 10,000 recipients. Rackspace has not officially announced an hourly limit.
Multiple users’ experience has suggested that Rackspace frowns at poor content quality, in fact, more than the quantity. The 10,000 daily limit seems safe, but email content of low quality can get your account blocked faster on Rackspace.
Rackspace is more concerned about your deliverability, i.e., how many of your sent emails make their way to your recipients’ inbox. If your emails are automatically flagged as spam by anti-spam filters or manually by the recipients, you are closer to getting blocked.
BlueHost
The daily limit here is unclear. However, BlueHost pegs its hourly frequency at 150 emails and about 70 emails per half-an-hour (30 minutes).
While BlueHost allows users to upgrade their limits, they demand a valid reason from the user. If you have a ‘valid reason,’ all you need to do is contact their support team. A warning or a time-out error follows email bounce on BlueHost. Either way, your account will be disabled, pending the review of the BlueHost team. You can expect your account to be back online within 24 hours, provided the BlueHost team has cleared it.
DreamHost
DreamHost is silent about the daily limit, but the hourly limit is 100 recipients if you are sending a single message.
Note that the sending frequency per 15 minutes is 25 emails, so you cannot send more than five different messages to five recipients on DreamHost. The ‘Configure an Announcement List’ is there for users that want to send the same email to several recipients.
Host Gator
Host Gator’s daily limit is set at 12,000 emails. The hourly limit is about 500 emails per domain. Also, the threshold for every subdomain is 500 emails per hour.
You can only send to an email list of over 900 recipients during off-peak hours. You will need a VPS hosting solution or dedicated server from Host Gator to send to a mailing list of over 5,000 recipients.
Despite these seemingly large numbers, Host Gator prioritizes quality above quantity. Also, chances are you will never send such large amounts of emails in a cold email campaign.
Yahoo! Mail Plus
The daily limit is 500 emails, while the hour limit is said to be 100 emails per hour (unofficial).
Prevent a Sharp Increase in Your Mailbox Activity!
The better and safer option is to set longer periods for sending a message to a bigger group of prospects. If this is not done, certain messages may be sent too frequently, thus triggering a sharp rise in your mailbox activity. Your email provider will flag your dedicated outbound email account that hardly sends out emails daily but suddenly trying to send over 300 emails within an hour. So, always adopt a schedule that facilitates a smooth and steady flow of outgoing emails. Furthermore, do not be tempted to send too many messages out within the supposedly “golden hours.” While you may do that for your newsletter, it is not advisable for cold email campaigns; else, you want your account blocked.
Lastly, the concept of “golden hours” is a myth. Yes, certain times are best for sending emails. However, this varies for each prospect group. For automated campaigns, setup the dispatch such that your emails have more than an hour to get sent. This arrangement seems more natural and hardly causes a spike in your mailbox activity, which may get your account blocked.
Conclusion
Feel free to choose from any of the email providers discussed above. However, do not forget that they all prioritize both quality and quantity, i.e., how many emails you send and how many find their way into the inbox of your recipients. This is another reason to work on your emails’ deliverability and keep it at a decent level.
