How Many Cold Emails Can I Send Per Day? The Ultimate Guide (2022)
This guide, written fresh in 2022, is going to break down everything you need to know about email sending limits.
Note: If you are reading any other materials on email sending limits and you see them using phrases like “Office 365” or “G-Suite ” regularly, then you are reading some outdated stuff. Microsoft and Google updated their product names awhile ago.
Whether you are sending cold emails for sales and lead generation, newsletter emails, or regular business correspondence, every email service provider (ESP) has sending limits on how many emails you can send per day.
The most-common ESPs are ones like Gmail / Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 / Outlook, Yahoo, and Zoho.
Each of these providers has different daily email sending limits.
Now, if you are looking to send cold emails for sales or lead generation, a lot of cold emails, you might be wanting to know, “How many cold emails can I send per day?”
The answer has a few practical parts though:
1. What are the limits of how many emails I can send per day?
2. How many emails can I safely send per day to ensure they will reach my contacts’ inboxes and not go to spam?
For the first part – “How many total emails can I send per day?” – there can be two limitations.
First – the email sending limit varies based on who your email service provider is.
Second – if you are sending your emails with a cold emailing platform or sales CRM, those platforms often set their own daily sending limits apart from whatever your ESP allows.
We will go into more detail on each of these.
First, let’s look at the email sending limits with different ESPs:
Email Sending Limits by Email Service Provider
Each email provider has different sending limits.
Here is a breakdown of the most popular email service providers along with their daily sending limits, costs, whether these platforms are suitable for cold emailing or marketing emails, and some additional feedback:
Marketing Automation Platforms
Email Service Provider | Daily Sending Limit | Cost Per User |
Aweber | 500 (Free Plan) Unlimited (Paid Plan) | Free ; $19.99 - $149.99 / Month |
Campaign Monitor | Unlimited | $9.99+ / Month |
Constant Contact | Unlimited | $9.99+ / Month |
Hubspot | Unlimited | $45+ / Month |
Mailchimp | 500 (Free Plan) Unlimited (Paid Plan) | Free ; $11-$1,200 / Month |
High – Volume Email Sending Platforms
Email Service Provider | Daily Sending Limit | Cost Per User |
Amazon SES | 500 (when in sandbox) 10,000 (out of sandbox) | $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send or receive |
Mailgun | 300 | $35 - $90+ / Month |
Rackspace | Unlimited | $45+ / Month |
Sendgrid | 500 (Free Plan) Unlimited (Paid Plan) | Free ; $11 - $1,200/ Month |
Zoho CRM | 50 (Free Plan) Unlimited (Paid Plan) | Free ; $11 - $1,200/ Month |
Popular Email Service Providers
Email Service Provider | Daily Sending Limit | Cost Per User |
Amazon Workmail | 10,000 | $4 / Month |
AOL | 500 | Free |
Bluehost | 150 per hour | $2.75+ / Month |
Dreamhost | 100 per hour | $1.99+ / Month |
Gmail | 500 | Free |
Google Workspace | 500 (Free Plan) 2,000 (Paid Plan) | $6 / month (Business Starter) $12 / month (Business Standard) $18 / month (Business Plus) |
GoDaddy | 500 | $11.99 / Month+ |
Hostgator | 12,000 | $2.75 / Month+ |
Hubspot CRM | 500 (Free Plan) 5,000 (Paid Plan) | Free ; $45+ / Month |
Microsoft Outlook | 300 | Free |
Microsoft 365 | 10,000 | $6 / month (Business Starter) $12.50 / month (Business Standard) $22 / month (Business Plus) |
Yandex | 500 | Free |
Zoho | 1,000 | Free ; $1 - $3 / Month |
What happens if you exceed these daily email limits? Can they suspend your account? What happens then? And can an ESP suspend your account even if you don’t exceed the sending limits? Next we’ll dive into these questions.
What if I Send Emails In Excess of the Daily Sending Limit?
If you try to exceed these sending limits, your account may get suspended by the ESP.
The policies vary by each ESP though. They set their own rules.
It could be that the ESP just limits your sending for the day and then resets your limit the next day. Or, it could just suspend your account…
You will know if you got suspended though because you and your account administrator will get error messages saying something to the effect that your account has been suspended and your emails are undeliverable.
What if My Account is Suspended?
At their discretion, ESPs can suspend your account for exceeding the daily sending limit.
But… they can also suspend your account if you do not exceed the daily sending limit, but otherwise violate their terms of service. This can include things like sending email messages with “suspicious sending patterns” that look spammy to them.
If your account is suspended – what should you do next?
Some ESPs will disable your account, but permit you to re-activate it. Some examples of these include:
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365
- Zoho (paid)
Other ESPs, including ones like Mailgun, may terminate your account entirely and prohibit you from reactivating.
How to Avoid Getting Suspended by an ESP
ESPs’ algorithms are on the lookout for suspicious-looking sending activity.
This can include things like:
- Spikes in outgoing email sending volumes
- High rate of spam complaints
- High bounce rates
To avoid getting suspended by an ESP if you are sending a lot of emails, there are things you can do to protect yourself and keep your accounts safe. Some suggestions are:
- Warming up your emails
- Don’t buy email lists
- Stagger your emails – don’t send them all at once
- Ensure the contacts you are emailing are verified so they don’t bounce
- Personalize your email contents
- Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for authentication
Email Sending Limits by Cold Email Platform
You might be wondering – If you have a limitation on email sending by ESP, then why does a cold emailing platform or sales CRM have email sending limits?
There are a few reasons why – both from a business perspective and from a practical standpoint.
From the business standpoint, these cold email platforms and sales CRM tools set daily limits because they can make more money by setting email sending limits. If you are sending 20 emails per day, you might not be seeing the same value out of a cold email platform or sales CRM as someone sending 2,000 emails per day, and so the cold email service provider can decide to charge more for that higher-volume sender.
But, that being said, there are also some practical considerations. Namely:
1) email deliverability to making sure your emails reach the email recipients’ inboxes (and avoid the spam folder); and
2) ensuring your email accounts don’t get suspended by your ESP
These are two big concerns, and are something you should be thinking about outside of whatever email sending limits you might have set by your ESP.
Even though you might technically be able to send 300 or 500 cold emails per day with Gmail, if you do, there is an increased likelihood that either your emails go to your recipients’ spam folders, or that Google flags your account and suspends you.
And you don’t want that.
This is because most ESPs don’t want their users sending cold emails, bulk emails, using their platforms for sending email newsletters, or doing sales lead generation.
So, they have monitoring tools designed to watch out for suspicious sending patterns and sending volumes.
Next, let’s talk about some practical considerations of limiting your daily email sending, for both deliverability, and protecting you from getting your email account suspended.
How Email Sending Limits Protect Email Deliverability
If you send 3,000 cold emails per day per sender, out of nowhere, your emails will most likely all go to spam folders.
This is because ESPs are actively trying to prevent email spammers sending junk email, and sending 3,000 emails per day to contacts you have never emailed before, looks spammy.
Email service providers are monitoring the emails coming in and out of their servers, from and to their users. They want to ensure that their users are not spamming and not receiving spam. To do this, they do a few things.
ESPs have “sender scores” aka “sender reputation” that they use to determine whether a particular email address should reach the mailbox or go to spam.
As an example of what goes into sender scores, ESPs can detect if a bunch of addresses on their servers are getting emails from a specific sender or IP address, and flag anything that looks suspicious behavior-wise.
This can be the case if, for example, you are trying to use your email platform to send email blasts of nearly-identical content to many email recipients at once.
Here are some email sending behavior flags that can affect your sender reputation and ESPs are watching out for:
- A brand new domain and email address suddenly sending a ton of emails
- A big spike in outgoing messages during a particular day and time
- Receiving too few replies to your emails
- Email frequence
- Too many sent emails to external recipients are bouncing
- High rate of spam complaints
- Hitting spam traps (more on spam traps here)
- Many of your emails’ contents are identical or very similar
- Do you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records set up for your domain?
Basically, ESPs are trying to determine whether or not the behavior of your mailbox looks like that of a normal person sending personal or business emails, and treat your emails accordingly.
Beyond these factors, ESPs also subscribe to spam lists / block lists to ensure that email addresses that are known to be spamming will have all their emails go right to spam folders.
Here’s a guide on email deliverability best practices that can help you ensure your emails stay out of spam folders and get to the inbox.
Ultimately, having an email sending limit lower than what your ESP provides can help you better ensure that your emails go to the proper inboxes and avoid spam folders.
How Email Sending Limits Keep You From Getting Suspended
As mentioned above, virtually every email service provider has measures in place to find out if their users are sending lots of emails. And if they detect something off, they can suspend or terminate your account.
This can happen even if you fall within the sending limits set by the ESP.
As an example, three of the most popular email service providers are Gmail, Outlook, and Zoho. Each of them have published daily sending limits of 300 or more emails per day.
But, we have seen instances where each of these platforms have suspended users who have sent far less than 300 emails per day because of “suspicious sending patterns.”
Basically, if they notice you sending hundreds of emails per day, or sending emails in a way that looks like the emails are not being sent by a human, they will just shut that account down.
So, to avoid getting suspended, take into account our recommendations on things like email warmup, personalizing your emails, authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and also ensuring your contacts’ emails are all verified.
Can I Avoid Email Sending Limits By Using Email Marketing or Marketing Automation Software?
This is a common question I get a lot.
The thinking here is, “I have a tool like Mailchimp or Hubspot that I am using for my email newsletters. Can I just import my cold email / sales lead contacts to them, build an email template or drip campaign, and email them?”
Definitely not.
For one, it will get you poor deliverability.
For another, when they catch you they will suspend your account.
Platforms like Mailchimp and Hubspot are meant to be used to send emails to contacts who have already opted-in to your emails. It’s a requirement of their terms of service.
Emails sent from their platforms are not sent like cold emailing platforms or sales CRMs. Emails sent from Mailchimp or Hubspot-type email marketing automation platforms usually send emails to their contacts in email blasts all at once to the intended recipients. Your recipients, who have not opted into your emails, are going to behave differently than people who are familiar with your emails and have already opted in. And the ESPs can tell.
If you were to try to use Mailchimp/Hubspot for cold emails, it would also be suspicious to the ESPs, because they would notice you uploading new lead lists to send campaigns to.
Not only would the emails likely go to spam (over time even if not right away), but you would also likely have your account terminated eventually as using their platforms for cold emailing violates their terms of service.
How to Ensure Your Emails Reach The Inbox
First, warm up your inbox.
Next, set your own daily send limit so that your ESP doesn’t suspend you.
If you are using Postaga to send out cold emails, in most cases we recommend setting a daily sending limit of emails to 50 emails / day per sending email address if you are sending email via SMTP with a service like Gmail/Outlook/Zoho, so as to both avoid going to spam folders and avoid getting your email account suspended.
Some users with warmed up emails can send up to 200 emails per day safely though.
If you are using the Postaga Mailgun integration (details here), you can send up to 300 emails / day / user safely.
If you are using Amazon SES, you can send up to 10,000 per day. But, I can’t personally vouch for what the deliverability would be if you sent 3k emails / day via Amazon SES from one email address.
How to Send Cold Emails at Scale
One last thing before we wrap this up…
I recognize that you might be here because you searched Google for “email sending limits” because you want to send a lot of emails.
So, let’s say that you want to send a few thousand targeted lead generation cold emails per day. How should you do that?
There are three main ways you could go about this:
- Set up a bunch of email accounts with Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / Zoho
- Set up with Mailgun or Sendgrid
- Amazon SES
Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / Zoho
For each of these, the process is going to be similar.
First you will create an account with each of these.
Then, you can verify your domain / domains.
Then, you will create new email addresses for each domain.
If you are setting up sending limits of 200 emails / day per email address, you will need a lot of email addresses, and need to warm them all up.
Let’s say you wanted to send 2,000 emails per day. You would need to set up 10 email addresses. Also, you might want to split those email addresses between multiple domains, in the event one domain runs into deliverability issues.
Mailgun / Sendgrid
Mailgun and Sendgrid are bulk email sending platforms.
Through them, you can connect your domains and easily spin up new email addresses.
With Mailgun, you get 300 emails per day per email address.
With Sendgrid, there are not really any limits, but you may want to nonetheless set up multiple email addresses for deliverability sake.
Amazon SES
With Amazon SES, you can send up to 10,000 emails per day.
Here is how you would do it:
- Set up an account with Amazon SES through their AWS portal (https://aws.amazon.com/)
- You will also need to set up IMAP with Amazon SES, which can be done in the Amazon environment by using Amazon Workmail
- Once you create an email address, and connect it to Workmail, you can then connect it to your cold email platform via SMTP
You only need 1 email address with SES to send up to 10k emails / day, but, as mentioned earlier, you may want to set up multiple email addresses for deliverability sake.
Caveat: As mentioned above, I cannot guarantee what your deliverability would be if you are sending 3k cold emails / day with Amazon SES. I have not personally attempted this.
Email Sending Limits Infographic
To help you remember each email service provider’s daily sending limit, we’ve created the following infographic detailing each platform’s sending limits and associated costs. This infographic touches on email sending limits for:
- Marketing Automation Platforms
- High – Volume Email Sending Platforms
- Popular Email Service Providers
Check it out below, and also feel free to use the embed code below the infographic to add it to your own website!
Embed and Share this Infographic
You can add this infographic to your own blog article or webpage by copying the HTML embed code below and adding it to your webpage.
Conclusion
Hope all this helps you in your quest to send emails!
As a quick recap:
- Each email service provider has unique daily or monthly email sending limits
- Even if you don’t exceed the email service provider sending limits, they may suspend your account if your email sending looks suspicious or performs poorly
- No matter what email provider you use, make sure that you warm up your email inboxes
- Authenticate your domains with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records
- Ensure your contacts’ emails are verified so they don’t bounce
- Don’t buy email lists
- Personalize your email copy
- Don’t use email newsletter platforms like Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, or Hubspot for cold emailing / sales lead generation outreach
FAQs
If you are sending cold emails, the total number of emails you can send per day will vary based on your email service provider (ESP). The popular email providers like Google Workspace / Gmail, Microsoft 365 / Office 365 / Outlook, and Zoho usually limit users to 300 – 500 emails per day. But, if you want to avoid having your account shut down for sending too many emails, you should stick closer to up to 200 emails per day.
Possibly yes. This depends entirely on the email service provider and their rules. With services like Google Workspace / Gmail, Microsoft 365, and Zoho, if they see you sending too many emails and suspend your account, they may allow your admin user to reactivate your suspended account.
If you want to ensure your emails reach their destination inboxes and stay out of spam folders, you should limit the total number of emails per day that you send to up to 200 per day for most email platforms.
With Gmail you can send up to 500 emails per day.
You can send up to 2,000 emails per day per email address with a paid Google Workspace plan, or 500 per day for a trial plan.
Outlook lets you send up to 300 emails per day with a free account.
For paid Microsoft 365 accounts, the email sending limit is 10,000 emails per day.
Zoho has an email sending limit rule of 1,000 emails per day.
Yes. Your email service provider may suspend or terminate your account if you have suspicious email sending patterns, are sending bulk emails, have many bounced emails, or are getting lots of spam complaints. Each provider has their own rules.
No. If you want to send more emails than Gmail allows, you might want to consider using multiple accounts and mailboxes or trying a different provider that is built for sending mass emails.
Using a mass email platform like Postaga, and connecting with the right email service providers, you can send emails at scale.
Don’t simply send the same email to multiple To: or BCC: recipients. That won’t turn out well. Instead, send separate emails. Use an email platform like Postaga that is built for sending mass emails, help you personalize your emails for each of your recipients, and ensure your emails go to their inboxes.
Don’t. For one, mass emailing from a personal account tends to get poor deliverability (going to spam folders). Second, if your account gets flagged or suspended, you might not be able to get it back. As a rule, don’t send mass emails from an account that you use for regular email correspondence.
No. Having attachments will increase the likelihood your emails go to spam.
Some email services limit the amount of people you can send one single email to, whether as TO, CC, or BCC recipients. This can be in addition to a daily send limit. Google Workspace, for example, limits you to 2,000 emails per day, but up to 10,000 recipients per day. As an example, you could be within the limits if you sent 2,000 emails total and had 5 To email recipients for each email.
This error is due to sending too many emails in a short period of time. It is triggered when using the Gmail API and third-party cold emailing or mail merge software tools.
If you are planning to send cold emails, you should not be sending the same exact message to multiple recipients. You should be sending a single message personalized for each separate email recipient.
As a practical matter, don’t send more than one email per minute if you are sending cold email campaigns or bulk email campaigns. It will look suspicious to email servers and increase the likelihood your emails go to spam folders if you send multiple emails per minute. While platforms like Outlook or Gmail might have a rule that you can send up to 30 emails per minute, you shouldn’t press your luck if you want to keep your accounts active. You will want to stagger your email frequency to have one email message go out every few minutes. If the timing is randomized via a cold email / mail merge tool, the better.
Verify your mailing lists to ensure that you are not messaging invalid email addresses. Sending messages to invalid email addresses will result in your emails bouncing. If your bounce rate is too high, your messages will gradually wind up in spam folders.
Yes. First, you should not include attachments with cold emails. Including attachments in cold emails increases the likelihood of your emails going to spam.
Yes. Using mail merge tools, like tools that integrate with Gmail (e.g. Gmass), are still required to adhere to the email service providers’ limit of emails per minute, emails per hour, or emails per day.
The reset period is typically a rolling 24-hour period. In any given 24 hours, you cannot exceed the limit of messages per day, recipients per day, recipients per message, individual emails, etc.
Sometimes yes. This varies based on the email service provider. Some email providers have published details of the email per hour limits, while other email services have algorithms that limit your sending based on different factors.
You should not use your primary domain if you are going to be sending cold emails with any frequency. If you accidentally end up getting your account on a spam list, that will hurt all email addresses on your primary domain. Instead, use alternate domains and domain aliases (e.g. instead of “[your website name].com” send your cold emails from “[your website name].net” if the domain is available to keep your main accounts safe.
No. You should not send cold emails from free trial accounts. When you are in your first 30 day trial period, your account is going to be more heavily scrutinized by the email service providers whether it’s Gmail / Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 / Office 365 / Outlook. If you send mail merge / bulk emails / cold emails in that free trial period, your emails will likely go right to spam.
Often, email service providers will send you alert notification emails or error messages that will tell you if your emails have bounced or are undelivered (whether it’s because you sent too many emails, had too big an attachment file size, etc.). Some services call these a “non-delivery report”. If you are using a cold email platform, they can help you keep track of your deliverability rate so that you can best ensure your emails are reaching the recipients’ mailboxes.
Yes. If you are using email outreach software to help you send cold emails and automate follow-up emails, those follow-up emails are considered individual emails for the purposes of your limit per day. So, be sure to take those into account when planning your cold email campaigns.
Yes. Over the years, Microsoft and Google have rebranded their business apps from Office 365 and G-suite respectively to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
No. Outlook and Gmail are the free versions of the Microsoft and Google email services, meant for individuals. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are meant for business customers and are paid services allowing for multiple users in a given account.
No. The email sending limits are set by the service that you are using to send the emails. So, even if you are using an email client like Apple Mail, Outlook for Windows / Mac, or Superhuman, if you are sending the email via your Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo!, Aol account, etc., you are still held to the rules and limits of your email service provider.
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