Email outreach campaigns have an average conversion rate of 2-5%. To make this work, marketers send hundreds or even thousands of emails daily.
The problem is, sending such high volumes of emails risks being marked as spam. Worse, your email account might get suspended. This could last as long as 24 hours all the way to a permanent ban.
Each email provider implements sending limits to prevent spam and keep accounts safe. In this article, we’re going in-depth into these limits and covering:
- Why marketers should learn email sending limits.
- The sending limits of top email service providers.
- And the best tools that help marketers during email campaigns.
Why It’s Important to Know Your Email Provider’s Sending Limits
Many marketers often end up wondering “why are my emails going to spam?”. Understanding sending limits prevents this.
Sending limits determine how many emails can be sent each day and how often. This helps emails reach recipients' inboxes rather than spam folders.
But email campaigns go far beyond the first sent email. Consider the volume for email warm-ups, follow-ups, and email nurturing. These can easily put you over the sending limit.
All that’s left is ensuring that the content provides value and doesn’t contain any spam trigger words. If spam-like content reaches your prospect’s inbox, it’s possible you get reported. Done enough times, your account can even get blacklisted.
When an email address receives frequent penalties its reputation also takes a nosedive. Prospects could potentially filter out emails from your domain, not just one email address.
Not only will campaigns take a hit, but a business’s overall brand image as well.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, we assembled a list of the sending limits of some of the most popular email service providers on the market.
Email Sending Limits You Should Know for Top Email Service Providers
The sending limits of each provider vary depending on pricing. Some are free while most are premium services with free features.
There are free trials for the majority of premium email-sending services. Depending on the size of your business, you can easily make do with a free account.
For small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that want to scale faster, looking into premium email services is recommended. Now let’s take a look at the sending limits for some of the most popular email providers on the market.
Outlook Email Sending Limit
Outlook’s free service allows 300 maximum emails per day and 100-500 recipients per message for verified email addresses. There are two major requirements to get an address verified.
Your outlook email should be at least 30 days old. If it’s not, Outlook lowers its sending limits. It also considers frequency of use as another factor.
Outlook wants to see if you actually use the account. The more back-and-forth emails, the better your reputation gets.
Outlook charges $6.99 - $9.99 a month for their premium services. Instead of 300, you get to send 10,000 messages per day under the premium plan.
Office 365 Email Sending Limit
Office 365 paid services boast a massive 10,000 email limit per day. There is no hourly limit for the message-sending frequency. It only has a per-minute limit of 30 messages instead.
One email address can have up to 500 recipients for a single email. A sending limit of that scale is more than enough for any good email marketing campaign. But be careful when using automation.
Because there’s no hourly limit, it’s easy to go over the per-minute maximum. The challenge with automation here is making the campaign look organic.
One solution is to trigger email sending at random intervals. You can also set your automation tool to send emails one at a time.
Gmail Email Sending Limit
Gmail provides a maximum of 100 emails daily when using a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). But using your browser allows you to send a maximum of 500 emails a day.
For sending frequency, it’s best practice to send out 20 messages per hour using a free account. Going beyond this limit risks a 1 to 24 hour account suspension.
Sending emails from mobile also has a limit. Google Sync mode on the Gmail mobile app follows the same sending limits as the web-based version of Gmail. The Gmail mobile app's IMAP setting follows the same sending restrictions as when using a SMTP.
Although it’s accessible to many, doing email outreach campaigns on a free Gmail account isn’t recommended. One major downside is having an “@gmail.com” for an email address instead of a business domain.
Instead, you can opt to use a Google Workspace account. Your account can use a business domain to make you look more legitimate to prospects and your daily limit is much higher.
Google Workspace Email Sending Limit
Workspace, formerly “G-Suite” provides a sending limit of 2000 emails per day for the premium plan and 300 for trial. But upgrading from trial to premium won’t give you 2000 emails outright.
Your sending limits need to mature first. This is done to keep Google’s systems healthy and email accounts safe. It prevents email abuse and helps create a sustainable platform.
If an account goes beyond the limits, it could receive warnings such as:
- You have reached a limit for sending emails.
- You reached a Gmail sending limit.
- You exceeded the maximum number of recipients.
You can read more about how to speed up the account maturity from their official documentation.
BlueHost Email Sending Limit
There is no official source that shows BlueHosts’ daily email limit. However, it does allow an hourly limit of 150 emails at a rate of 70 emails per 30 mins.
Going past this sending limit results in warning messages or time-out errors. BlueHost then disables your account for review. If the review team sees no serious issues, the account will be back up within the next 24 hours.
Having a conversation with the customer support team is another way to boost the hourly limit. The only condition is that you need to provide a legitimate reason as to why your limit needs an increase.
MailChimp Email Sending Limit
Free MailChimp accounts get 2,000 emails daily and 10,000 emails monthly for accounts created before August 29, 2022. Accounts created thereafter are allowed a daily limit of 500 emails and a monthly limit of 2,500 emails.
The Essentials package costs $11 monthly and includes 500 contacts, and allows users to send up to 500,000 monthly emails.
Access to all features begins at $299 per month for the Premium plan, while the Standard plan provides advanced automation at only $17 per month.
For enterprises or bigger organizations, there’s also an email service package for $1,300 that allows 200,000 contacts. Businesses with more than 250,000 contacts can talk to MailChimp's sales team regarding their pricing.
GoDaddy Email Sending Limit
GoDaddy offers 250 emails per day in their free plan. You can increase this to 500 in their paid package. This gives you a maximum of 300 messages per hour and a 200-message limit per minute.
Duplicate email addresses for the same email message are automatically removed, and distribution lists are broadened to include all intended recipients.
GoDaddy allows a maximum of 100 recipients per email. The 100 authorized addresses can be any combination of the “To, CC, and BCC” fields. The compose window will show error messages if there are more than 100 recipients.
Sending several automated messages with follow-ups can quickly exceed the daily limit. If you send several campaigns with follow-ups, it’s best to schedule messages for different days of the week.
You can also use multiple email addresses to avoid overlapping first-touch and follow-up emails.
Yahoo! Mail Plus Email Sending Limit
Yahoo only allows a limit of 500 emails per day and the maximum contact list given is 100. Each contact is counted as one email for the daily limit.
Yahoo doesn’t have any documentation regarding their hourly limit but sources say it’s 100 emails per hour.
This email service provider isn’t as popular compared to its counterparts like Gmail. Bulk-sending emails also aren’t recommended with Yahoo due to its low daily email limit.
ProtonMail Email Sending Limit
ProtonMail allows 150 daily emails capped at 50 emails per hour for free plans. Premium services start at €4 per month and allow users to send up to 300 messages per hour and 1000 daily emails.
If you upgrade further to their professional or visionary plans, you can get unlimited daily emails. You can also create 15 unique email addresses and support for 3 custom domains. As an add-on, premium users can also access 10 high-speed VPN connections.
Zoho Email Sending Limit
Zoho provides free users with 200 messages daily. There is no documentation regarding the hourly limit.
Premium plans can offer 250-1000 daily messages depending on the package. The monthly cost of their premium services ranges from $3 - $6 a month.
When you implement Zoho One, you can streamline and standardize operations throughout your company. The premium plan also includes domain name creation and email addresses for its users.
How Instantly Helps You Boost Deliverability
Now that we know the email-sending limits, let’s discuss deliverability. Deliverability is a metric that shows the percentage of emails that actually reach your prospects’ inboxes.
Marketers use this to gauge how effective an email campaign is. If the rate is low, there may be critical issues that need addressing. It could be the content, the subject lines, or a lack of email warmup.
Instantly can deploy AI that mimics human interaction between email accounts with just a click of a button. It uses an algorithm that writes emails for you and preps them for warm-ups.
During the warmup, you can get a 100% open rate paired with high response rates. This gives your domain and email addresses legitimacy in the eyes of other email service providers.
With the help of AI, you can run email campaigns with a new address in just 2-3 weeks.
Email warmup increases an email address' daily sending limit by building its reputation. This makes warmups one of the best strategies for improving deliverability.
Businesses can do this manually, but it quickly becomes an issue when scaling up. For smaller businesses that want to try it manually, they can start by finding 20-30 people to send emails to.
These should be people you know or trust. Start sending in small volumes. Gradually increase this over the next two to three weeks.
Tell the people to mark each email you sent as “Important.” If it lands in spam, ask them to mark it as “not spam.” Forwarding emails to others can also grow your sender reputation significantly.
With automation, you don’t have to worry about doing any of these steps and save yourself many hours of manual work.
Key Takeaways
Marketers can optimize email marketing campaigns better if they know the sending limits of email service providers. It’s essential, especially when using automation.
Knowing the limits helps strategize the volume and frequency of emails you can send daily. This streamlines email campaigns, increases email deliverability and boosts conversion rates.
To recap, here are some important notes on email-sending limits:
- Every email provider has its own sending limits - Research the email service you use before any campaign. Identify how many emails you can send and in what frequency. This prevents the likelihood of account suspension or blacklisting.
- Email sending limits can increase - There are several ways of increasing sending limits. Premium services boost daily sending limit and hourly/per-minute frequency. You can also use email warmups to legitimize the email addresses you’re using before campaigns.
- Email addresses can be suspended - Sending too many emails or using spam trigger words are likely to end up in spam folders. Service providers can suspend an email address for 1-24 hours if they exceed the sending limit.
- Learn sending limits when automating - Automating email campaigns can easily get you over the sending limit. It’s necessary to set sending triggers based on the limits of your email service provider.
- Watch the frequency, not just volume - Your daily sending limit might be in the thousands, but your hourly or per-minute sending limit could be much lower. Learn to spread out your email schedules to prevent suspensions.
There’s a lot to consider when it comes to email sending limits. Instantly can help you navigate through these easily. Try our 14-day free trial today so you can decide if it’s the right platform for you. Click here to learn more!
