Mailbox provider
Gmail sending limits
Gmail (free @gmail.com)
| Account / daily limit | 500 messages / 500 unique recipients per rolling 24-hour window. Counted on a sliding window, not at midnight; lockout clears 1-24h after you hit it. |
|---|---|
| Send rate | No officially published per-minute throttle; free Gmail offers no SMTP relay / bulk-send tier, so practical throughput is hand-send speed. |
| Recipients per email | 100 recipients per single message (To/Cc/Bcc combined). |
The account cap is not a cold-email volume
The 500/day cap is a hard deliverability ceiling, NOT a cold-email target. Worse, a free @gmail.com address cannot send from your custom domain with aligned SPF/DKIM/DMARC, so it is effectively unusable for cold outreach at any volume. If used at all, a new mailbox should start at ~5-10/day and stay under ~20-30/day -- roughly 15-25x below the account cap.
Good to know
- Limit is enforced over a rolling 24h period, so a burst can lock the account out well before a calendar-day reset.
- Five messages to the same address count as one unique recipient toward the daily cap.
- No custom-domain authentication alignment -> recipients see it as personal mail; not for cold campaigns.
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.