Send to your whole list without hitting a daily limit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n With Mailrelay’s free account you get up to 80,000 emails a month and 20,000 contacts, with no daily cap and no credit card.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There isn’t just one sending limit. Depending on where you send from, one or another will affect you:<\/p>\n\n These are the official sending limits of the most widely used providers. Keep them in mind if you still send your campaigns from your own mailbox.<\/p>\n\n A personal Gmail account trips the limit if you send more than 500 emails in a day or put more than 500 recipients in a single message. A warning appears saying you’ve reached your sending limit, and you won’t be able to send any more for a period of 1 to 24 hours.<\/p>\n\n With Google Workspace<\/a> there’s more headroom: 2,000 messages per day per user, or 500 if the account is in its trial period. Each message can have up to 2,000 recipients, of which a maximum of 500 can be external. If you exceed the cap, the user may be unable to send for up to 24 hours.<\/p>\n\n On Outlook.com, Microsoft 365 subscribers can reach up to 5,000 recipients per day, with a maximum of 500 per message. Of those, only 1,000 can be people you’ve never written to before. Free and newly created accounts have lower limits, which rise as the account builds trust.<\/p>\n\n What if your list has 3,000 contacts? With Gmail it would take you six days to reach them all. That’s why these mailboxes are fine for everyday email, but not for email marketing. On our blog you’ll find a comparison of bulk sending with Gmail vs. Mailrelay<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n There’s another key number. Since February 1, 2024, Gmail considers anyone who sends 5,000 or more emails in a day to personal Gmail accounts a bulk sender. Yahoo applies similar rules, and Microsoft followed suit on May 5, 2025 for Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live.<\/p>\n\n Going over that volume isn’t prohibited. But it means you have to meet more requirements. You need to authenticate your domain with SPF<\/a>, DKIM<\/a> and DMARC<\/a> and offer one-click unsubscribe. In addition, your spam rate<\/a> must stay below 0.3%. Google recommends not going above 0.1%.<\/p>\n\n And the consequences are already real. Since November 2025, Gmail rejects emails that don’t comply. Outlook, for its part, bounces them with error 550 5.7.515. You’ll find all the details in our article on what Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo require to keep your emails out of spam<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n It depends on who sets the sending limit. If it’s your mailbox, the account is blocked from sending for a few hours. If it’s your platform, the campaign is paused until you upgrade your plan or a new period begins.<\/p>\n\n When the limit is set by the receiving server, messages come back as temporary bounces, or soft bounces<\/a>, and are retried later. That’s why a campaign sometimes takes hours to be fully delivered. We explain it in detail in why some emails get stuck in the queue<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n The underlying problem is sender reputation<\/a>. Hitting sending limits over and over, or suddenly sending far more than usual, is a red flag for filters. And rebuilding that reputation takes weeks.<\/p>\n\n Before you run into a sending limit, work out how much you need. Multiply your contacts by the number of sends you’ll do each month. A list of 8,000 people with a weekly newsletter and one promotion a month adds up to about 40,000 emails. With that figure you’ll know whether your tool and your plan fall short.<\/p>\n\n Next, increase your volume gradually. If you’re going from 2,000 to 50,000 emails, do it over several weeks. This is known as IP warming<\/a>, and providers appreciate it.<\/p>\n\n Look after your list. Addresses that no longer exist generate bounces and damage your reputation. Good email list hygiene<\/a> and double opt-in reduce those errors.<\/p>\n\n Authenticate your domain even if you don’t reach 5,000 emails a day. It’s the norm today and it improves deliverability for any sender.<\/p>\n\nTypes of sending limits<\/h2>\n\n
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Gmail and Outlook sending limits<\/h2>\n\n
![\"Email](\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/limites-de-envio-email-gmail-outlook-1024x576.png\")
<\/figure>\n\nBulk senders: the 5,000-email threshold<\/h2>\n\n
What happens if you exceed a sending limit<\/h2>\n\n
How to send more without problems<\/h2>\n\n