SMTP relay
Amazon SES sending limits
Amazon SES
| Account / daily limit | Sandbox (default for new accounts): 200 messages per 24h. Production starter quota (after approval): 50,000 messages per day, then auto-scaled upward by AWS as your reputation proves out. |
|---|---|
| Send rate | Sandbox: 1 message/second. Production starter: 14 messages/second (raised automatically with good sending behavior). |
| Recipients per email | 50 recipients per message (To/Cc/Bcc combined) -- a hard SES limit. |
The account cap is not a cold-email volume
SES is raw infrastructure throughput -- the 50,000/day quota is what AWS will physically accept, not a deliverability allowance. SES gives you no IP warmup, list hygiene or reputation management; on a cold domain/IP you must ramp from ~50/day over weeks. Blasting toward the quota on a cold sender destroys reputation. Treat the quota as orders of magnitude above any safe cold volume.
Good to know
- Sandbox also restricts you to verified recipient addresses until you request production access.
- Deliverability is entirely on you: warm a dedicated IP, authenticate the domain, monitor bounce/complaint rates (SES enforces thresholds).
- Quota and rate auto-increase with healthy metrics, but the day-1 production number is 50k/day at 14/sec.
Scale safely past one inbox.
Real cold-email scale comes from many inboxes each sending a safe volume, not one inbox maxing its cap. Scheduler Zero spreads sending across warmed inboxes and paces it for you.