I’ve often spoken (typed) before about my wife’s business. If you’re a new reader of the Finish Line Blog, I’ll point out that she’s the owner and artistic director of a ballet and voice school. If you’re interested, (or want to sign up for lessons) go to http://www.nccballetandvoice.com. Thanks for bearing with me on that “shameless” plug. Recently, she tried sending an e-mail through Gmail to a distribution list that includes all of her ballet parents. The e-mail kept failing, and returned something like sixty five error messages saying that the message was undeliverable. She never ran into such difficulty before. As it turns out, she was lucky, and so was I, because the issue introduced us to the world of e-mail sending limits.
If you have a free Gmail account (with an address like abc123@gmail.com), you’re allowed to send 500 e-mails per day if you sign in at https://mail.google.com/ to send them. If you use a mail client such as Windows Live Mail or Apple Mail to send and receive mail from Gmail, your limit is cut to 100 e-mails per day. These numbers sound incredibly large until you consider that one message sent to fifty people counts as fifty e-mails in Gmail’s eyes! Unfortunately, Gmail isn’t alone. Every mail provider sets limits of varying degrees. I’ll run through a few now. In our area, Comcast and Charter are the two cable companies we have to choose from. If you have a Comcast address, you can send one thousand e-mails per day, with each e-mail having a maximum size of 10MB. Own a Charter address? You can send fifty e-mails per hour, with a similar 10MB message size limit. You can opt for AT&T service instead of cable in our area. An AT&T Yahoo e-mail address can reach one hundred recipients per e-mail, with a message size cap of 20MB. Believe it or not, people still use AOL. With an AOL address, you’re limited to one hundred recipients per e-mail, and five hundred each time you’re connected to their service. Messages are limited to 16MB. We used to pay for an Earthlink address before we finally wised up and went with Gmail. With Earthlink, you’re allowed to reach a maximum of one thousand recipients per day. We’ll wrap up with some of the more popular free e-mail providers. Yahoo users can send one hundred e-mails per hour, with a maximum size limit of 10MB per message. Finally, Hotmail users are allowed to send one hundred e-mails per day, and are also limited to 10MB per e-mail.
If you exceed the aforementioned limits, it’s not the end of the world. After the allotted time has passed, be it one hour or one day, your account will be re-activated and you’ll be able to continue e-mailing as usual. This is an important issue to know about, however, for anyone who has to e-mail a large number of people. For example, if you’re the head of the PTA, or a football coach, you can be impacted by such limits. These limits were put into place to curb spam or junk e-mail, and to push their paid services in the process. You can’t blame them for trying!