Google Apps limits the number of e-mails you can send per day

I don’t mean this to sound scandalous or even surprising, but since this was news to me I thought I’d share.

I just received an upsell e-mail from Google asking if I wanted to try their Premier Edition free for 30 days. Amongst the features mentioned as an incentive was ” increased email daily sending limit”.

Turns out that (quite understandably) Google places limits on the amount of e-mail each of its hosted accounts can send out per day. Here are the details:

I can’t send or receive email: I’ve reached a sending limit

Google has a number of sending limits in place to prevent abuse of our system, and to help fight spam. If one of your mail accounts reaches an abuse limit, the account will be temporarily unable to send mail.

Each Standard Edition account can currently send to 500 external recipients per day. Premier and Education Edition users can send to 2000 external recipients per day. The email addresses can be distributed among the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields. Administrators can contact all user accounts within the domain by adding everyone in the domain to an email list.

Here are a few additional tips:

  • Create multiple user accounts to send mail. For example, ‘Admin1’ and ‘Admin2’ can each send 500 messages to reach 1000 unique recipients. (On the Premier or Education Edition, two accounts can reach 4000 recipients.)
  • Stagger mass communications over the course of two days. For example, send messages to the allotted number of recipients on day one, wait for 24 hours, and send messages to another group of recipients on day two.
  • In all editions of Google Apps, an individual message can be sent to a maximum of 500 external recipients at one time.

It’s a high enough limit that I doubt any legitimate user of this free service run into it often, but it’s been communicated in a surprisingly understated way.

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