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Master email sending limits with our comprehensive guide, optimizing your email campaigns for maximum reach and impact.
In 2022, Statista reported that 4.26 billion users communicated via email. That’s approximately half the world's population, which will undoubtedly balloon as more people in underserved areas embrace technology. The number of emails sent will also significantly expand as bulk email campaigns gain traction in the coming years.
But does that mean companies have unearthed a limitless marketing panacea that will see them reach prospects and customers without engaging in conventional outreach methods?
Well, that's definitely far from the truth. While email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective strategies, it has one significant challenge- sending limits. Email service providers (ESPs) have to protect their customers/subscribers from rogue marketers who bombard their emails with unsolicited messages anytime they feel like it. Hence, sending cold email campaigns must be compliant with the limits designated by the ESPs.
Otherwise, the sender may receive error messages stemming from deliverability issues. Also, your emails could be stuck in the recipient's spam folder because the email client considers them as such.
In line with these limits, it is, therefore, prudent to understand how many recipients an email outreach campaign should target daily to avoid being labeled as spam or, worse, being banned from sending emails. This guide will elucidate everything about email-sending limits in detail by focusing on the limitations set up by the main ESPs. Further, it’ll explain the penalties for going beyond the set limits.
Hence, for an expansive understanding of everything about email-sending limits, we invite you to read this detailed guide that covers everything on the topic. Master email sending limits with our comprehensive guide, optimizing your email campaigns for maximum reach and impact.
Let us explain the daily email send limits for different email service providers. Note that the figures in this section are as per the time of this article’s publishing. But they’ll keep changing over time, so we advise you to visit the terms section of your ESP/Email client occasionally to see if there’s any significant change from what we give. All in all, we’ll update this section regularly to ensure it remains up-to-date and always credible.
Arguably one of the oldest email hosts, Yahoo! Mail Plus allows you to send up to 500 emails daily. But note that there’s a condition: You must ensure you send these emails only to 100 recipients. Also noteworthy, if you send ten emails to one recipient, this number adds up to the 500 daily limit. So, you must be careful not to exhaust the limit by sending way too many unnecessary emails to a single recipient.
How about the hourly rate? Is there a restriction to it? Well, Yahoo is not clear on this, but on average, you shouldn’t do more than 100 emails in an hour. Sending relatively more emails than this will appear fish and may have Yahoo block you from sending more emails even before you hit your daily maximum limit.
Yahoo, on their website, reports that they don’t disclose the maximum number of emails you can send at one given time. But they’ll definitely pause your account if you send too many messages simultaneously. Fortunately, they lift the limit after some time, and they always indicate the time you’ll have to wait before sending other messages.
Further, yahoo cautions users to use third-party bulk email options- An indicator that their 500 email messages limit is fixed and they cannot expand the limit even for companies engaging in email marketing.
The maximum number of email messages you can send via Gmail via SMTP is 100. For those using a browser, the daily limit is 500 emails. Gmail has not clarified the maximum email message limitations per hour. But this doesn’t mean you should do all your 100 messages in less than one hour, as it’ll appear like you’re sending spam.
The ideal average per hour is about 20 messages for free Gmail users. With this number, it wouldn’t appear like your email outreach is way too forceful/spammy/intrusive onto the recipients.
But what’s the penalty for those who exhaust the maximum limitations? You’ll be banned for a duration spanning between one hour to 24 hours. Also, does sending cold email campaigns from a free Gmail account make any sense? Not at all, as the upper limit is way too easy to attain, so you’ll be curtailed in your outreach.
Ideally, you should subscribe to the Google Workspace account as it sounds professional and has a higher limit ceiling. The account gives you a username that increases your business name in it. So, for marketers, the email won’t sound like it is from a scammer somewhere luring users to subscribe to some inexistent product.
Besides taking care of the number of emails you send from your free Gmail account, you must also write a quality, professional, and personalized cold email. This is the only way to ensure your emails are safe from the recipient's spam folder.
It is the professional version of the free Gmail account and is thus perfectly suited for reaching multiple email account recipients. The service has a trial period during which you can send 500 email messages daily. Once the trial duration lapses and you take up the product (premium package), your sending limit is significantly increased to 2,000 email messages daily.
Notably, like the free Gmail account, this also doesn’t have hourly limits. Nonetheless, you should be mindful not to send way too many messages per hour as it will raise the alarm to the email’s algorithm, and you’ll be labeled spam. If you exceed the daily limit, you won’t be able to send other emails in the next 24 hours, so you should not hit the upper ceiling.
Sometimes, you’ll be blocked even before you surpass your daily limits. Hence, you must write excellent messages to ensure your emails have great deliverability because this feature is also a determinant of whether or not Google will block you. The solutions include:
Google has a mechanism for scanning the message to determine if it is spam. If they deem it so, it blocks the message from being sent in the first place to shield the recipient from spammers who are out to flood users with unsolicited emails.
Send up to 12,000 emails daily with Host Gator at an hourly maximum rate of 500 emails per domain. Also, for every subdomain, you can do a maximum hourly rate of 500 emails. But beware of the Host Gator email sending restrictions, especially when doing bulk emails.
For instance, the ESP will only allow you to send emails to a mailing list featuring more than 900 receipt addresses during off-peak hours. This is when there’s limited email traffic. More importantly, if you are doing a cold email outreach campaign targeting more than 500 recipient addresses, Host Gator will have to give you a dedicated server for the cause.
Oftentimes, you’ll find out that it’s pointless to send such bulk emails when you can just write a few quality emails to a relatively small email list. This way, you’re bound to make more conversions than just if you did numerous low-quality emails to an extensive client list and have them all end up in the recipient’s spam folder.
Outlook.com takes spamming seriously, so they have very strict criteria on the maximum email sending limits. Primarily, you can only send a measly 300 emails daily, and this isn’t just for everyone but for the highly rated accounts. So, what are the grounds for an account being given a high rating?
You can circumvent your way around the 300 messages per day by enrolling in the premium version, which allows you to do up to 10,000 emails per day.
This is the ultimate ESP for email outreach campaigns without the risk of breaching the sending limits because it allows you to do up to 10,000 recipients daily. Sounds like those are too many emails, so where’s the sending limits catch?
Well, many as they may sound, you are not allowed to just send emails erroneously to all 10,000 multiple email accounts simultaneously because there’s a per-minute limitation. The maximum allowed number of messages in a minute is 30. While sending these emails manually is virtually impossible, you can actually breach it when having an automation tool.
Therefore, even with automation, make sure to set the send frequency to something like one outbound email message in 10 seconds. This way, you’ll be in line with the per-minute regulations of Office365 and not risk a ban. Most importantly, ensure your deliverability (delivered/sent ratio) is top-notch; otherwise, you risk getting banned even before exhausting the daily limit.
Like Office365, the daily sending limit for Rackspace is 10,000 recipients. But there’s a caveat when dealing with Rackspace, and it does not even have anything to do with hourly limits, as this is not even specified. The ESP is very hard on a sent email folder with low-quality messages that are not delivered to the recipients simply because they’re considered spam.
If you fall prey to this categorization, you’re jinxed because Rackspace will block you even before you exhaust a tiny slice of the 10,000 recipients' upper ceiling. So, you must focus on doing excellent emails with profound personalization to ensure high deliverability. Otherwise, the massive recipients' limits will be of zero help to you.
GoDaddy has a daily recipients limit of 250, although, with the premium package, you can send emails to up to 500. How about the per-hour limitations? GoDaddy is also a go-to ESP for email marketing campaigns, allowing up to 300 messages per hour. But you cannot send all these messages in one sweep as there’s a 200-messages-per-minute limit.
You can easily exhaust your daily email-sending limits even on the premium package, as 500 recipients are way too few for an intense email marketing campaign with follow-ups. Hence, the secret is to ensure you don’t schedule all your cold sales emails on the same day. Also, you can use a different email service provider to do the initial emails and GoDaddy for the follow-ups or vice versa.
Be careful not to hit the hourly limits, especially while using an automation tool. Ideally, set a fairly low sending frequency (way below the hourly limits) to ensure your messages are all delivered without breaching the rules.
Most importantly, don’t be tempted to send all your messages in one hour while looking to meet the golden email-sending durations (the specific days when most emails stand a great chance of being opened).
Need a flexible email-sending platform that can expand your limits per your demand? Look no further than BlueHost. With a maximum of 150 emails an hour, you can send cold emails to quite a substantive recipient list, especially if you’re a small business owner. But you must ensure that you send a maximum of 70 messages every 30 minutes.
While the maximum Bluehost daily limit remains unclear, the ESP has an incredibly flexible plan, allowing you to expand your send limit by simply contacting their support team. But again, the golden rules of sending emails apply despite their leniency. So, if your emails hit the recipients' spam folder rather than their regular inbox, you will receive a warning from Bluehost.
Worse, the ESP will deactivate your account as it investigates whether you sent spam emails, and if everything is fine, your account’s email-sending capacity will be reinstated in 24 hours.
When you exceed the email sending limit, you’ll be unable to send further messages until the allowed time lapses. This means that, say, you have a sending limit of 500 messages per day, and you’ve already sent your 500th message. This should be the last message of the day.
Otherwise, further attempts to send more emails will return a bounce-back email. This is typically an automated response that your emails have yet to be delivered to the desired recipients. Most email service providers provide users with a Non-Delivery Report (NDR) indicating the email never reached the desired recipient’s mailbox.
Take the case of a user who tries to send a new message after exceeding Mircosoft Outlook's daily limit. They will receive an error message that looks like this:
554 5.2.122: The recipient has exceeded their limit for the number of messages they can receive per hour. For more information, go to…
Note that the error message highlighted in the example starts with a ‘5’, meaning that it is a permanent bonce. Hence, the error cannot be cleared unless the particular condition is met, which is the above case; it is all about waiting for a reset of the hourly sending limit.
A worthy point is that you should not try to resend the message after such a hard bounce error because it’ll resolve nothing until the condition is met. In fact, it might end up damaging your email reputation, and your ESP could block you further.
Another typical condition is a case where you haven’t necessarily exceeded the designated email-sending limits, but the email service provider deems your sending pattern as spammy/suspicious. This will also attract a limitation even before you hit the email sending limit, and you’ll receive an email bounce code resembling the following (For Gmail Users):
421 4.7.0: Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily blocked. For more information, visit Prevent Mail to Gmail users from being blocked or sent to spam.
The case above represents email filtering, and it happens when the contents of your cold emails scream of having too many generalizations (low-quality wording) that they are deemed spam by the ESP antispam algorithm.
Remember, having too many of your emails blocked or flagged as spam affects the overall email deliverability across various email providers. Therefore, to avoid a limitation such as that raised above, simply do a few quality emails over numerous cold emails that lack personalization.
A point to note is that unlike the error we looked at before, this one starts with code ‘4.’ It means that this is a temporary error/soft bounce that clears once you resend the message. But it means you must first address the error lest the issue escalates to a hard bounce, which is impossible to manage by simply resending the email.
There’s no absolute figure we can give as the maximum number of emails you must send to be labeled spam, as it depends on various factors.
Therefore, being marked as a spammer has nothing to do with only the number of messages you send to clients. However, this is still a huge determinant, especially for those doing a cold email outreach campaign. The bottom line is that you can send just a few messages and get spam flagging, while another sender sends hundreds of messages and barely gets flagged. It all depends on a combination of the above factors.
We advise you to be modest when sending mass emails because, as we highlighted above, sending way too many messages is a precursor to having them go to the recipient’s spam folder.
On average, you should do at least 200 quality email messages daily and ensure you have warmed the email before sending these emails. This means you cannot just open a new email and send numerous messages the next day. You have to warm it up to receive these numbers gradually.
The above limit applies to cold emails. But how about Newsletter + transactional email content for clients you’ve already started engaging with? Well, for these, you can send more emails, but beware of the allure of overdoing it. It is always more about quality than quantity.
But are these the only regulations that can shield your emails from landing in the spam folder? Definitely not because, as we highlighted earlier, being regarded as spammy has something to do with more than just numbers. Let’s see the other measures you can take to boost your email deliverability.
Most email lists feature email addresses that don’t exist; some have broken links or haven't been used for a long time. Therefore, you must do proactive email scrubbing to eliminate all these addresses often, which is imperative in boosting email deliverability. Why does this matter?
With remarkably high email deliverability, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) gain a good reputation for your email address. And this is a great thing as it significantly lowers the chances of your email being considered spam. Moreover, it minimizes the email bounce rate (having emails sent back to the mail server because the recipient couldn't receive them). This is highly incredible for a successful email outreach campaign.
Make cleaning your email list a regular act, as there’s a significantly high data deterioration rate with almost every database. On average, about 22% of your data will deteriorate per year precipitated by many aspects such as:
There’s a host of many technicalities that determine whether or not an email should be considered spam. Working your way around these factors will boost your overall email deliverability. Let’s see how some of them work.
This technical setting is handy in preventing spammers from forging your email address and sending messages that appear to be from your email address. With an SPF, all forged sender addresses will be immediately detected and blocked.
Therefore, when you have SPF protection, your emails have minimal chance of being considered spam.
It is a technology that helps email recipients identify whether it is the domain owner who actually sent the email. So how do you beat it? Simply adding a digital signature to the email gives the email a valid DKIM. You can also add this signature to the email header, which will authenticate you as the domain owner to the recipient.
Immediately after the recipient identifies the DKIM, the email will be received in the inbox rather than the spam folder.
It is an authentication method that applies SPF and DKIM to improve email deliverability rates. DMARC is handy in curtailing malpractices such as email address compromise, phishing, and email spoofing.
A subject line should be incredibly catchy to draw the attention of a cold email recipient. However, don’t just mislead clients and prospects by using subject lines that don’t really mean what is in the email’s body. This also includes using exclamative words that sound spammy, such as the following:
Most email antispam filters will nab these keywords and deem such emails spammy. Moreover, it lowers your recipient’s regard for your company, especially if they feel like you tricked them into opening promotional emails. When the brand image dips, so does the overall reputation, and this may discourage them from opening other emails from your address if they’re lucky enough to avoid the spam folder.
Say, for instance, a user has opted into your email subscription. A double opt-in setting sends a secondary email featuring a link the client has to click to confirm their subscription. This technique is handy in ensuring that future emails are not considered spam.
The option also incredibly improves your sender's reputation and separates you from spam bots that are incapable of using this authentication option. Moreover, from a business point of view, the double opt-in is handy in boosting email open rates and engagements. A client who has visited your email to confirm the subscription has a higher chance of visiting it for further emails than one who’s never had first contact with your address.
Bulk emails are always suspect, and many land in the spam folder when they have all the ingredients of low-quality email.
For instance, as outlined above, you must clearly refine your subject line and ensure the email has the perfect wording and feel of professional work. Also, don’t just have links all over the email with prompts asking the recipient to click this and that. This sounds like a spam email, and it will definitely find its way to the spam folder.
The email design matters a lot in injecting a touch of professionalism into it. The text and images must be aligned coherently, and make sure to use a modern email design/layout. Also, don’t attach what is unnecessary, and make sure your text reads clearly with no grammatical errors. Typos will do you a lot of bad, so always proofread your emails before sending them.
ISPs have a range of measures to cushion their subscribers from spammers, and one of the methods they use to weed out malpractices is setting up spam traps. A spam trap is an email address that is actually real and receives emails but is set in a way that if your bulk email reaches it, all the other emails you send will be considered spammy.
Hitting a spam tram is pretty damaging because it damages your IP address's reputation and may even result in blocking your ‘from domain.’ In addition, there will be a significant dip in email deliverability, which will further push your subsequent emails to the spam folder. Restoring the good sender reputation is no mean feat, so by all means, you should steer clear of spam traps.
Spam filters work by scrutinizing emails, especially if they’re sent en masse; scanning through them to identify the presence of typos, spammy words, and irrelevant content. If there are way too many of these issues in your emails, they will be immediately flagged as spam and prevented from reaching the recipients' addresses.
You’ve probably encountered emails that sound like they’re screaming at the reader, and one common ingredient in them is the use of upper case letters in the subject line. This is wrong email etiquette and may prompt the spam filters to deem the entire email spam.
Subscribers in your email list shouldn't have to feel like they are ensnared in a trap that they can’t get out of when they want. So SMTP mail senders and ESPs require all the email senders creating promotional emails/newsletters to include an unsubscribe link that is well visible and easy to access by the subscribers. This helps them opt out with ease when they need to.
This will provide the subscribers with the option of unsubscribing from your email list rather than flagging your messages as spam. So, your sender’s reputation remains high even when there are a few disgruntled individuals who want out of the newsletters.
Don’t send emails using the same IP as your other transactional emails to ensure you don’t have a knock-on effect when your address is flagged as spam. Chances are, if you flout one of the cold email sending specifics, you could be banned or blocked from other emails. This means you will also not be able to send other transactional emails using the same IP address.
Also, it ensures you don’t exhaust the daily sending limits for one IP address, which would undoubtedly happen if you sent all your emails (promotional, newsletter, cold emails, and transactional emails) from the same address. Again, don’t just send emails without warming up either of the addresses, as it will cause spam filters to do their thing.
Don’t just rush to do a bulk email campaign without first analyzing if they are being flagged off as spam. Instead, do numerous tests by primarily taking a seed test with friends, family, and co-workers addresses. Send emails to these emails and check out if they are delivered.
Essentially, this will help you pick out issues such as a bad subject line or content that’s spammy or low quality. Next, rectify what's off to improve the deliverability. Also, the spam tests help identify the IP’s reputation and whether your addresses have been flagged or blocked.
Big media houses and newsrooms such as New York Times do thousands of emails a day and barely get flagged, while you could have your email blacklisted for sending just 100 promotional emails. This doesn’t mean the ESP is biased against your email address; there are just way too many things you are getting wrong.
You may be sending way too many emails per hour, or day, or something is off with your email content. So start by checking the email sending limits of your email service provider. Are you compliant with the minute, hourly, and daily limitations? Next, check out the structure of your emails in line with the aspects we have listed in this guide.
Most importantly, build an excellent email address reputation, have excellent deliverability, and your email marketing campaign will be a bliss.
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