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    How many cold emails should you send per day?

    By Joshua at SunMatch Advisors · Updated · 3 min read

    The hard limits

    Google publishes the most a Google Workspace account can send. Hit one and the account can't send new email for up to 24 hours.

    • 2,000 messages a day per paid account, or 500 on a free trial.
    • 3,000 recipients outside your company a day.
    • 2,000 different outside recipients a day, or 500 on a free trial.

    These limits are for everything a mailbox sends, including normal work email. Nobody who sends cold email well gets close to them from one inbox.

    What Google and Yahoo actually watch

    • Spam reports. Google says to keep the spam rate shown in its Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%. Yahoo's line is 0.3%. At 0.3%, three people marking you as spam out of every thousand emails is already too many.
    • Setup. Every sender needs SPF or DKIM. Anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail accounts needs SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and one-click unsubscribe on marketing email. Yahoo asks bulk senders for the same, and to honor unsubscribes within 2 days.
    • Sudden jumps. Google's guidelines say to increase sending volume slowly, and more slowly the more you send. You can raise it faster when you send every day instead of once a week.

    Why fewer per inbox works better

    Cold email goes to people who didn't ask for it, so every email carries some risk of a spam report. Spreading sends across a few inboxes keeps each one's numbers low and steady. If one inbox has a bad day, the others keep going.

    There's a second reason. An email that mentions something real about the company reads like it was written for them, because it was. That takes care with each one, and it's easier to keep the quality up at a few dozen a day than at a few hundred.

    Don't forget follow-ups

    Follow-ups count toward each day's sending too. Here is the math with made-up round numbers: an inbox that starts 30 new people a day and sends two follow-ups to each will soon be sending around 90 emails a day. Plan the number of inboxes around the total, not just the first emails.

    How to send more without hurting delivery

    1. Add inboxes instead of raising the number on one.
    2. Start low with a new inbox and raise volume slowly.
    3. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC before the first send.
    4. Email published addresses only, and remove addresses that bounce.
    5. Put a mailing address and an easy opt-out in every email, and honor opt-outs right away.
    6. Watch your spam rate and slow down if it climbs.

    How we do it

    We email published addresses only, never addresses guessed from someone's name. AI reads each company's website and writes one real detail about it, and the rest is a template we write with you once. Each inbox sends a few dozen new emails a day, with two follow-ups around day 4 and day 8. Every reply is sorted, interested ones go straight to you, and a no is final. Every email has a mailing address and an opt-out. See the rules cold email has to follow and how our cold email outreach works.