How many emails should you send to protect your deliverability?

A common question when starting a cold email campaign is how many emails can you send in a day.

It depends on the email service provider you are currently using, as they are the ones who initially set their limits. It's important to set limits and avoid email blasts since it greatly helps to reduce spam.

In this article, we will be diving into the most popular email service providers, but also discussing the optimal sending limit for our campaign, while taking into account our sender reputation and email deliverability. We should not forget that cold email is more of a marathon than a sprint. Slow and steady wins the race.

This table sums up how many emails it's okay to send in a day depending on the email service provider:

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What are the risks of exceeding limits?

Limits are there for a reason, so before we dive into sending out our email campaigns we need to revise closely how many emails we can actually send out without risking our sender reputation.

To begin with, if we exceed the limit set in place by our provider, we run the risk of being suspended. This could last 24 hours or it could be permanent. Not an ideal situation.

In addition, if we send a large amount of emails and a large percentage bounces back due to an exceeded limit we could face further risks where our brand image and sender reputation can take a serious hit.

How can I respect email-sending limits?

The best way to make sure that your cold email campaign is protected is to prepare a schedule throughout the day. If you choose to do this with a cold email tool, you can adjust your settings so that emails are spread out throughout the day and not sent out in the form of blasts

We recommend sending around 100-150 emails a day, spread out throughout the day so you mimic actual human behavior and protect your email deliverability as much as possible.

For scheduling stick to these tips:

• Respect the weekends
• Chose timeframes that suit your target audience’s working hours
• Stick to a 100-daily email limit

Slow and steady wins the race

Email algorithms are tricky and on a daily basis, we see more spammers and scammers pop up, so protecting recipients has become a major concern for email service providers, which is why it is crucial to be sensible about our email campaigns.

We don’t want to send out 300 emails in one day and get a super low response percentage, because that will seriously harm our domain.

If you want to make sure you’re protecting your email deliverability, you should have a good deliverability checklist to ensure you’re following every step correctly.

Whether you’re losing sleep over exceeding limits or just want to save some time, use a tool such as lemlist, where you can automate all of your cold emails and adjust your own limits and schedules!

What are the limits?

We can take into consideration two different types of limits. The limits imposed by our email service providers, and on the other hand the recommended limit to ensure success.

ESP Limits

Generally, email service providers set limits in order to avoid spammers and scammers.

In most cases, the ESP (Email Service Provider) could flag our account as SPAM and shut it down altogether. Which is obviously far from our goal

Here’s a list of 8 of the most popular email service providers, so you can take into account the limitations of your provider.

Gmail and GoogleWorkspace

Gmail is designed for businesses of all types and sizes, it is a cloud-based email marketing solution that assists with creating custom professional email addresses, sending bulk emails, etc.

Plus it is integrated into Google Workspace.

📊 Email sending limits per day
‍2,000 emails with a paid Google Workspace account
1,500 emails for mail merge (previously called multi-send)
500 emails for trial accounts

Should you exceed an email sending limit, you’ll get an error message, such as:

• You have reached a limit for sending email.
• You reached a Gmail sending limit.
• You exceeded the maximum number of recipients.

💰Pricing  Free plan, from $6 (Business Starter)

iCloud Mail

iCloud Mail is an email service provider brought by Apple, which seamlessly integrates with all your other Apple devices.

📊 Email sending limit
‍1,000 messages per day
1,000 recipients per day
500 recipients per message
The size of incoming and outgoing messages (20MB)

Should you exceed the sending limit, you could receive one of these error messages:

• On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: A copy has been placed in your Outbox. Sending the message failed because you exceeded your sending limit.
• On your Mac: Cannot send messages using the server iCloud.
• On iCloud webmail: Cannot send message. You have exceeded the total number of messages you can send each day (or you have exceeded the total number of recipients you can message each day). Or, Recipient limit exceeded. This message cannot be sent because it has too many recipients.

💰 Pricing Free, starts at $0.99 (for 50GB)

Microsoft Outlook

Work efficiently with email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and more—together in one place. Office integration lets you share attachments right from OneDrive, access contacts, and view LinkedIn profiles.

📊 Email sending limits
‍5,000 daily recipients
500 maximum recipients per message
1,000 non-relationship recipients per day

Should you exceed the sending limit, you could receive a message such as this:

• Our daily message limit was meant to stop spammers--we're sorry that it's getting in your way. You can wait a day to send your message.

💰 Pricing  Free

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo Mail is a web-based email app that can be accessed on desktops and mobile devices. It includes features for document and image storage, travel confirmations, package delivery tracking, etc.

📊 Email sending limits
‍100 emails per hour approximately
500 emails a day  approximately
100 recipients  approximately

Yahoo! Mail does not disclose the exact email-sending limit in order to better enforce anti-spam policies. However, should you exceed their limits, you will receive a notification where they state the time you have to wait to continue sending emails.

💰 Pricing Free

Proton Mail

Proton Mail is a private email service that uses open source, independently audited end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption to secure your communications.

📊 Email sending limits
‍150 emails per day for free plans
Unlimited message with the Proton Unlimited Plan

Should you exceed the sending limit, you could receive a message such as:

• You are temporarily banned from sending because of spammy or undeliverable emails

💰 Pricing Free, from $3.99/month (Mail Plus)

Zoho CRM

This omnichannel, cloud-based software solution is a centralized platform to track leads, automate sales workflows, generate invoices, and seamlessly integrate with 500+ third-party apps.

📊 Email sending limits
‍150 emails per day Free plan
250 emails per day Standard Edition
500 emails per day Professional Edition
1000 emails per day Enterprise Edition
2000 emails per day Ultimate Edition

Should you exceed the sending limit you could receive an email stating

• Error (5.4.6 Mail rate exceeded)

💰 Pricing Free, from $15 (Standard Edition)

GMX

GMX is another multi-faceted provider, with just one of its services being free email accounts.

📊 Email sending limits
‍Spamhaus (spam filtering software) in place

Should you be flagged as spam, you will receive a fair warning in your inbox. GMX gives you a list of recommendations to follow if you have been flagged as spam.

💰 Pricing Free

AOL Mail

AOL Mail is a free web-based email service provided by AOL, a division of Yahoo! Inc.

📊 Email sending limits
‍100 recipients/message approximately
500 recipients/connection approximately

AOL does not disclose the exact email-sending limit. Should you exceed this limit, you will receive a notification, where it generally states the waiting time.

💰 Pricing Free

Recommended limits

Even if we have the ability to send thousands of emails in a 24-hour span, that may not be such a good idea for our personal interests.

The fact that we can sit around all day and watch TV doesn’t mean that we should, does it?

We recommend warming up your account starting at 10-20 emails per day, and ramping up to 100 emails per day by the fourth week or so.

After your account has been properly warmed up you could send up to 150-200 emails a day.

We do not recommend exceeding this amount too much due to the fact that not all your emails will be answered, opened, or maybe even delivered. Bear in mind that bounced email addresses will surely hurt your send reputation and email deliverability.

You want to take a slow and steady pace which will give you the opportunity to stop, check, and tweak if there are any issues arising along the way. It’s also a good idea to have a good email verification tool set in place to help you avoid this risk.

Key Takeaways

• Limits are there to protect us
• Slow and steady wins the race. Set out a schedule before jumping into the cold email pool
• Stick to a 100-150 sending limit
• Be consistent with your cold email campaigns
• Don’t neglect your email deliverability and be conscious about it
• Understanding the rules and limits put in place by our provider can save us a lot of pain