You have to know this. Especially if you do email outreach. Each email service provider has its own email sending limits. The limits may be daily, hourly, and sometimes also per minute. If you’re sending cold email campaigns without being aware of your email provider’s limits, your email account may get blocked before you know it.

Why is it crucial to be aware of the email sending limits?

If you’re sending your cold emails from your own mailbox (your own SMTP), the limits of your email service provider are the ones to keep an eye on when setting up your cold email campaigns.

Sending too many emails a day (or sometimes even too many an hour, or a minute) may block your email account. For example, you won’t be able to send any kind of email from this account for 24 hours or more.

If you know the limits, and set up your delivery time and the number of emails sent daily per campaign according to those limits, your campaigns will be smoothly sent as planned and your emails won’t be considered SPAM– provided that you’re not sending poor quality content without any personalization whatsoever.

If you’re sending anything that is considered spam, you may get blacklisted sooner than you reach your daily sending limit. Remember: the deliverability of your cold emails is also crucial if you want to avoid being blacklisted.

The email sending limits posed by your provider are for all the messages sent from your address. That’s why if you have several follow-ups planned within your campaign. Keep in mind that after a few days or weeks, not only your first touch emails will be queued to be sent a day, but also a number of follow-ups. As all the scheduled types of emails overlap, you may easily exceed the limits. The same goes for sending a few campaigns from the same email address at the same time.

Free Gmail email sending limit

Per day: 100 messages maximum via SMTP (but 500 emails via browser).

Per hour: There is no official information. However, from our experience, it’s good to send no more than 20 messages an hour from a free Gmail account.

Additional good-to-know: If you exceed the sending quota, Gmail will block your account for 1-24 hours. We usually don’t recommend sending cold email campaigns from a regular free Gmail account but setting up an address on a separate domain using G Suite (a business email service from Google) instead. This gives you greater opportunities as to the outreach volume and more control over your sending settings. 

Plus, your recipients will treat you more seriously if they get an email from business domain, rather than from name267@gmail.com. So if you do decide to use free Gmail account for your outreach anyway, make sure the address looks safe and legit to your recipients.

What’s most crucial to keep in mind, however, is that controlling the quantity of your outreach is one thing, but there’s also the quality to take care of. If you send poor quality cold emails with no personalization to a bunch of non-verified addresses, your provider may block you even before you hit the quantity limit. Especially if your provider is Gmail. So bear in mind that quality is even more important than quantity in this respect.

Learn More about How to Configure Your Desktop Email Client.