How many emails a day
can you send from Gmail

The limits in numbers

New Workspace accounts and accounts on a trial usually get a lower cap — the same 500 messages — until Google is satisfied the mailbox is being used normally.

What counts as one message

The limit counts recipients, not clicks on Send. A message sent to twenty addresses at once burns twenty units of the limit, not one. Cc and Bcc count the same as the main recipients.

So one-message-per-person and one-message-to-twenty-in-Bcc cost exactly the same — except the first arrives with a personal greeting and without a list of strangers' addresses in the header.

The day is a rolling one

The counter does not reset at midnight. Google looks at the last 24 hours: if you sent 500 messages at three in the afternoon, sending reopens at three in the afternoon the next day, not right after midnight. A campaign that hit the cap should be resumed a day after the last message, not first thing in the morning.

What happens when you go over

Gmail replies with an error along the lines of "You have reached a limit for sending mail" and blocks sending temporarily — usually for up to 24 hours. The mailbox keeps receiving mail; the messages that did not go out simply do not go out.

Going over once is harmless. Going over repeatedly is a signal: Google starts treating the mailbox as a source of bulk mail and watches it more closely, up to switching sending off for good.

Why the limit is not worth working around

The workarounds people suggest come down to three, and all three end the same way:

• Several accounts from one device. Google links them together and applies any penalty to all of them at once.
• Third-party "unlimited" SMTP relays. The message leaves from an IP address you do not control, whose reputation is shared with hundreds of other senders. A good part of that mail never reaches the inbox at all.
• Sending at full speed. You can technically fit inside the daily cap in a minute — but speed is exactly what Gmail and the recipients' mail systems read as bulk mail.

There is one real way to send more: move to Google Workspace, where the cap is higher and domain authentication can be set up properly — see how to stay out of spam.

How MailSharks keeps you inside the limit

The service sends through your own mailbox, so its ceiling is Gmail's ceiling. To keep you away from it, the caps are built in:

• A per-campaign daily cap. 100 messages by default, ready-made values of 50, 100, 150, 300. The campaign reaches the cap, pauses and continues by itself the next day.
• A ceiling per mailbox. No more than 2000 messages a day across all campaigns together — otherwise three campaigns would each stay inside their own cap while the mailbox went far past Gmail's.
• A pause between messages. Randomised, 5 to 10 seconds: an exact interval looks machine-made on its own.
• A separate mailbox for the API. The HTTP integration gets its own account and its own daily counter, so automated mail does not eat the quota you use by hand.

Next: how to stay out of spam and how to send a campaign from a Google Sheet.