You live inside the Gmail inbox, but are you aware of its limitations and restrictions? For instance, did you know that Gmail has a sending limit? As soon as you hit the maximum number of emails, Gmail will put up a stop sign and won't allow any more for the day.

The reason behind this is online safety. The sending and receiving limits are designed to keep your account safe from spam attacks and excess automated messages. As soon as you hit the limit, you cannot receive any new email. All incoming messages are bounced back to the sender.

Gmail's Sending and Receiving Limits

Gmail imposes these limits when you send emails to more than 500 recipients in a single email or send more than 500 emails in a day. But this block is temporary and you can resume your emails again in up to 24 hours.

If any email you send to someone comes back, check the email address for errors or wait for a few hours before sending it again.

G Suite accounts (e.g. yourname@yourcompanyname.com) also limit the amount of email a user can receive per minute, hour, and day. Their limits are far more generous: G Suite users are limited to 60 emails per minute, 3,600 emails per hour, and 86,400 emails per day.

Gmail's Attachment Size Limit

Here are a few points to remember for attachments:

  1. You can send up to 25MB in attachments with your regular Gmail account.
  2. If you have more than one attachment, they can't add up to more than 25MB.
  3. When a file is greater than 25MB, Gmail automatically adds a Google Drive link in the email instead of including it as an attachment.
  4. You can send a single file as large as 10GB via Google Drive

Working Around the Limitations

Gmail attachment-free limitations are well within reasonable use. If you have to send mass emails, try Google Groups instead.

Google Drive is Google's own solution for managing email attachments. Plus, you can password protect an attachment before you send a link to someone in an email. You also don't rock the boat for someone who hates large attachments in their inbox.

Have you ever been hit with an "email limit" error message yet? How do you prefer sending attachments?