What are Sending Limits?
Sending limits for emails may seem counter-intuitive to your goals, but the limits set in Apollo help protect your email accounts. Whether sending through Apollo or not, your email provider limits the number of emails that you can send if they suspect you of spamming large amounts of people you don't know.
Apollo uses your personal business email accounts as "linked mailboxes." Since your email provider only lets you send a finite amount of emails at a time, your account can be limited or suspended if you exceed their volume limits. Apollo's sending limits feature helps you avoid suspension or limitation by your email provider while helping you remain efficient.
Apollo Sending Limits
Navigate to Settings->Mailboxes and find the mailbox for which you'd like to view your sending limits.
Your "Daily Limit" and "Hourly Limit" are shown to the right of the mailbox.
Click the mailbox you want to edit to change the limits in the Mailbox Settings.
Sending limits through Apollo count all emails sent from your linked email address and schedules any emails over the limit for the following day or hour when you max them out. Your daily sending limit is based on a rolling 24-hour period, not on the calendar day.
Please note, the daily/hourly limits monitored by your email provider include all emails sent via Apollo and emails you send from the mailbox itself. If you send a high volume of emails from your email client, you should lower your limits in Apollo.
Email Provider Rate Limits
Gmail, Microsoft, and all other email service providers monitor sent emails to ensure that all individual accounts are used by individuals to email other individuals. You must use efficiency applications, like Apollo, responsibly to avoid the potential of your provider limiting sending or suspending your account. A suspiciously high number of emails sent in a small period of time can be a red flag for your email provider.
For example, Google Suite's hard limits are 400 emails per hour and 2000 emails per rolling 24 hour period. This means they never allow any of their users to send more than that number of emails via an individual mailbox.
Please note, you must develop a sending reputation with your email service provider. To do this, send a reasonable volume of emails with a low amount of bounces and SPAM complaints. Over time, you will develop a better reputation with your email service provider and you can send a higher volume of emails without having your account rate-limited or suspended.
Any new Gmail account that sends 400 emails per hour or 2000 emails per day will almost certainly get limited or suspended by Google. That amount of activity without a gradual buildup sends a clear message to Gmail's monitoring tools that you likely opened the email account to SPAM people.
Keep in mind there are many factors that come into play when Google determines your sending reputation and it's always best to play it safe.
How to Raise Your Limits
Generally, Apollo advises that you stick with the default mailbox setting of 400 emails per day and 100 per hour. If you want to increase the sending limits, you should do so gradually.
- Daily Limit: Increase by no more than 100 each week until you reach 1500 emails/day, which you should never go beyond if you're linked to a regular business mailbox.
- Hourly Limit: Increase by no more than 20 each week until you reach 400 emails/hour. Never go beyond 400 emails/hour if you're linked to a regular business mailbox.
Here are other additional suggestions you can consider to send more emails as well:
- Link additional mailboxes to users in your Apollo account so each mailbox has its own sending limits. Apollo Professional plan allows you to add up to 2 mailboxes per user, while the Custom plan allows you to link up to 5 mailboxes per user.
- Integrate with SendGrid via Apollo integrations. SendGrid allows you to send up to 6000 emails per day and 500 emails per hour.
Please note, do not set your limits higher than 2000 emails per day. For your first 30 days of sending emails with Apollo, you should not send more than 400 emails per day. If you need to send a higher volume than that, you should integrate with Sendgrid, which is a transactional email service built for even higher-volume sending.
When you try to set a large sending limit through your default ESP without integrating SendGrid, it's possible that your ESP will not allow them to send this quantity of emails. This is because sending limits are set by your ESP and not Apollo. Apollo's configuration is a way to have some control within the platform. ESPs that manage this number natively and typically look to limit how many emails an account can send automatically.
What Happens When I Hit My Limits In Apollo?
If you hit your Apollo sending limits in a given hour or day, Apollo automatically places the emails in a queue with the "Scheduled-delayed" status until the next available time to send. The next available time could be the next business day or the next hour, depending on the situation. Please note, Apollo puts this limit in place to ensure that you do not have your email account suspended by your email service provider for sending too many emails in a given amount of time.
To check on the status of your emails, hover your mouse over Engage in the navbar and then click Emails.
From the "Emails" tab, you can see the status of your email on the right side.
If the status is "Scheduled-delayed," it is likely because you hit your sending limit and the email will send at the next available time.
What Happens When I Get Limited/Suspended by My Email Provider?
If you are rate limited or suspended by your email service provider, it means that you've sent too much bad content or too many emails per day or hour and you should immediately lower your sending limits in Apollo, edit the content of any emails you're sending that received a high rate of SPAM complaints, and follow any further instructions given by your email provider to get back in their good graces.