Gmail Sending Limits: How Many Emails You Can Send a Day

A personal Gmail account can send 500 emails a day, and a paid Google Workspace account can send 2,000 per user. Gmail sending limits also cap a single email: 500 recipients on a personal account, and 2,000 on Workspace, of which no more than 500 may be outside your organisation.

A newsletter to 1,200 customers, such as a Chester bike repair shop's, doesn't fit in one Gmail email. From a @gmail.com address, one email reaches 500 of them at most. From Workspace it takes three emails of 400, and then the limit that matters is Google's spam rate.

Gmail and Google Workspace sending limits

Google sets Gmail sending limits per account, and each way of sending has its own figure. These are Google's numbers as they stood on 25 October 2026.

Account or tool	Daily limit	Limit for one email
Personal Gmail (@gmail.com)	500 emails	500 recipients
Google Workspace, paid	2,000 emails per user	2,000 recipients, up to 500 external
Google Workspace free trial	500 emails, to at most 500 different external people	2,000 recipients, up to 500 external
Gmail mail merge, on Workspace plans that include it	1,500 recipients, counted together with your other email	1,500 recipients
Apps Script, such as a script in Google Sheets	100 recipients on @gmail.com, 1,500 on Workspace	50 recipients

External means outside your organisation. Personal limits are on Gmail Help, and Workspace limits on Google Workspace Admin Help, last updated 22 October 2026.

Mail merge is on a separate help page, and script quotas sit on the Apps Script quotas page. Google warns that sending limits can change without notice.

Workspace also counts recipients across the day. One user can reach 10,000 recipients in total, 3,000 external ones and 3,000 different people, no more than 2,000 of them external.

After a trial, limits stay low until the domain has paid at least $100 in total; Google then allows up to 75 days for the rise. Script quotas rise no sooner than 60 days after that payment.

Attachments have a cap of their own: 25 megabytes per email on a personal account. Above that, Gmail swaps the file for a Google Drive link (Gmail Help).

What counts towards Gmail sending limits

On Workspace, Google counts every address an email goes to, in To, Cc and Bcc alike. Five emails to 10 people each use 50 of the day's 10,000 recipients.

These count towards your Workspace limit too:

• emails from your aliases, the other addresses on your account
• emails sent by people with delegated access to your inbox
• replies from your vacation responder

Automatic forwarding is left out of the count, because Workspace gives it a separate allowance of 10,000 a day.

Workspace's day is a rolling 24 hours, so the count doesn't reset at midnight. For @gmail.com accounts, Google gives no breakdown beyond the two caps of 500.

What happens when you hit Gmail's sending limit

Gmail stops new email from your account, usually for up to 24 hours, and the message it shows points to the cause.

What Gmail shows	Account	Cause	Sending again
"You have reached the limit for sending emails"	Personal	More than 500 recipients in one email, or more than 500 emails in a day	Usually within 1 to 24 hours
"Messages that you sent couldn't be delivered"	Personal	Many of your emails bounced, for example to invalid addresses	Possibly after 24 hours
"You have reached a limit for sending email", "You reached a Gmail sending limit" or "You exceeded the maximum recipients"	Workspace	A daily or per-email limit	After up to 24 hours

On Workspace, you can still receive email and use other Google services in the meantime. Google adds that an account which goes over its limits might be suspended. One that sends spam might be blocked from sending for good.

If Gmail blocks you after only a few emails, check which message you got. The one about undelivered messages points to bounces, not volume: an old list full of addresses that no longer exist, which verifying the list before the next send takes out.

How to send more than 500 emails from Gmail

No setting raises the Gmail sending limits on a free account. To reach more people, you change the account, the sending tool or the route, and each option has a catch.

Move to Google Workspace

A paid Workspace account sends 2,000 emails a day per user, from an address on your own domain. For a mailing list, the per-email rule bites first: one email holds 500 external addresses.

Use Gmail's mail merge

On eligible Workspace plans, mail merge in Gmail sends each person their own copy and adds an unsubscribe link, up to 1,500 recipients a day.

Email a Google Group

Google's own help suggests a Google Group: the recipients become members, and you send one email to the group's address. Everyone receives the same message.

On a group ending in @googlegroups.com, people without a Google Account can't be added directly, only invited. Nothing reaches them until they accept (Google Groups Help).

Split the list across days or inboxes

Sending a third of the list each day, or rotating several Workspace inboxes, keeps each account under its cap. Cold email tools are built on this.

It leaves Google's next check untouched. Bulk sending is counted per primary domain, across every address on it (Google's sender FAQ). Ten inboxes on one domain still send as one domain.

Why Bcc fails for bulk email in Gmail

Putting the whole list in Bcc is a common answer to how to send bulk email in Gmail. It adds no capacity, because Google counts To, Cc and Bcc together. Personal Gmail still stops at 500 addresses per email, and Workspace at 500 external ones.

Every reader also gets the same email, with no name in it and no unsubscribe link. Gmail adds none to an ordinary message, so for a reader who has had enough, the nearest button is Report spam.

In the UK, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) also require an opt-out in every marketing email, according to the Information Commission's Office (ICO). Addresses typed into To or Cc by mistake are a data breach risk, and the ICO has fined organisations for Bcc mistakes.

Why bulk email from Gmail ends up in spam

Spam reports, more than Gmail's daily counter, decide whether a bulk email reaches the inbox. Google sets a ceiling on the spam rate for everyone who emails personal Gmail accounts, and the figures are in the bulk sender requirements.

The rule covers Workspace users too. Google works the rate out per sending domain, per day, against emails that reached Gmail inboxes. If 500 of a day's emails land there and two readers press Report spam, that day reads 0.4%, already over the ceiling.

A @gmail.com sender never sees this figure, because Postmaster Tools, where Google reports it, only covers domains you can verify.

From a Workspace account, the reports count against your company's domain, the same one your staff send from in Gmail every day. Google says spam reports can lower a domain's sender reputation over time, and advises a separate From address for each kind of email.

A personal account has a further catch: you can't take your @gmail.com address to an email platform. Google treats a @gmail.com From address on email that didn't leave Gmail's servers as impersonation, and bulk senders doing it get temporary failures.

A newsletter that leaves Gmail needs a sending domain: your own, or one the platform gives you. At about 5,000 emails a day to Gmail users, Google adds two more rules: DMARC, a record that tells inboxes what to do with email failing its checks, and one-click unsubscribe. Yahoo and Microsoft set similar rules.

Moving bulk email off Gmail

An email platform isn't bound by Gmail sending limits: each subscriber gets a separate email from a domain set up for bulk mail, with the unsubscribe handling that a Bcc email from Gmail lacks.

The first step in MailGraf is Add sender, under Settings > Senders (Add a sending domain). A Workspace user connects a subdomain such as news.yourbrand.com, and a @gmail.com sender takes a MailGraf domain instead.

Replies go to the campaign's Reply-to address, which can stay the Gmail address your customers already know.

Before each send, the Deliverability checks card on the Review & send step shows whether SPF and DKIM are aligned and a DMARC record exists. It also lists the List-Unsubscribe header, which MailGraf adds to every send.

That header lets Gmail show readers an Unsubscribe option at the top of the email (checks before you send).

MailGraf holds an account's sending for review at a 0.1% complaint rate and stops it at 0.5%. Gmail doesn't share individual spam reports, so that figure can miss Gmail's. For a domain you own, Google Postmaster Tools shows Gmail's rate on days with enough volume.

In MailGraf, the Chester shop's 1,200 customers get one campaign instead of three capped emails, because the monthly plan has no rolling 24-hour counter. Set the Emails a month slider on the pricing page to your monthly sends and click Get started.