Email Sending Limits

Have you ever wondered why your email sending exceeded the quota?

Rob avatar
Written by Rob
Updated over a week ago

When sending emails through LeadSimple, which sends emails on your behalf from your email client, you may occasionally run into a sending rate limit. These limits on how many emails you can send at a given time are controlled by your email service provider. This means that LeadSimple doesn’t limit your email distribution, it’s your email client.

Email throttling is controlling the amount of email messages sent to a mail server at a specific time. Sometimes email clients will block emails when a high volume is sent by one sender in order to avoid spam and will send a soft bounce error message back to the sender.

This block is usually temporary and you would be able to send emails again after a short period of time. When your emails are throttled, you will get a message that says something like “user is receiving mail at too great a rate right now, please try again later,” or “user’s mailbox is over quota.”

This may occur due to:

  • Reputation issues with an IP address or domain

  • Sending from a new IP address or domain

  • Sending too much email in a short period of time

The email sending limits posed by your provider are for all the messages sent from your address. That’s why if you have several follow-ups planned within your campaign, you should keep in mind that after a few days or weeks, not only your first touch emails will be queued to be sent a day, but also a number of follow-ups. As all the scheduled types of emails overlap, the limits may be easily exceeded. The same goes for sending a few campaigns from the same email address at the same time.

Email throttling is a normal part of email delivery and each email client has their own threshold making it hard for you to determine how to deploy your emails. However, if you follow best practices, soon you won’t have to worry too much about email throttling. Email clients will get to know you as a legitimate sender and deliver your emails without fail.

Some best practices include:

  • Scheduling your emails to deploy over an extended period of time.

  • Segment your emails by domain (send from multiple email addresses) or split your lists into multiple parts, for this you may consider separating your marketing and transactional email traffic to keep their reputations independent.

  • Send your emails at earlier times so that all emails can be sent by your needed “completion” date.

  • Use our direct integration with MailChimp to sync your leads into MailChimp and send your bulk emails from there.

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