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sending limits and you see them using phrases like “Office 365” or “G-Suite ” regularly, then you are reading some outdated stuff.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

High – Volume Email Sending Platforms

Popular Email Service Providers

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:

1. Set up a bunch of email accounts with Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / Zoho
2. Set up with Mailgun or Sendgrid
3. 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:

1. Set up an account with Amazon SES through their AWS portal (https://aws.amazon.com/)
2. You will also need to set up IMAP with Amazon SES, which can be done in the Amazon environment by using Amazon Workmail
3. 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:

1. Marketing Automation Platforms
2. High – Volume Email Sending Platforms
3. 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!

Conclusion

Hope all this helps you in your quest to send emails!

As a quick recap:

1. Each email service provider has unique daily or monthly email sending limits
2. 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
3. No matter what email provider you use, make sure that you warm up your email inboxes
4. Authenticate your domains with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records
5. Ensure your contacts’ emails are verified so they don’t bounce
6. Don’t buy email lists
7. Personalize your email copy
8. Don’t use email newsletter platforms like Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, or Hubspot for cold emailing / sales lead generation outreach

FAQs