Google Workspace Email Sending Limits for 2026: A Practical Guide for Cold Outreach Teams

Most of the time, sending emails through Google Workspace feels effortless. You write the message, press Send, and move on to the next task. Delivery feels guaranteed because in your mind, you haven’t even come close to Google’s 2000 emails per-day publishing limit.

“What can possibly go wrong?” is your baseline assumption. However, that changes the moment your email lands in Promotions, Spam, or bounces back entirely. It’s especially confusing when nothing about your sending volume or behavior appears unusual.

Here’s the reality that most cold outreach teams miss:

The official sending limits are system caps, not inbox-safe limits. Gmail’s filtering kicks in long before you hit them. Even a small spike, an unverified list, or a weak sender reputation can cause placement issues, regardless of whether you’ve sent 30 emails or 300.

This guide explains how the published limits relate to real-world thresholds and how to scale outreach without causing filtering or blocks. But first, let’s address an important question.

What Are Google Workspace Email Sending Limits?

Google sets a limit on the number of messages a mailbox can send within a given time period. These limits apply across all sending methods:

• Gmail web or mobile
• SMTP relay
• Connected outreach platforms
• Gmail API

There are three types of limits to be aware of:

• Daily message limits: The total number of emails a mailbox can send in 24 hours
• Recipient limits: The total number of individual recipients you can send to across messages
• Per-message recipient limits: The number of recipients allowed in a single email

If you exceed any of these limits, Gmail returns an error message such as:

• You’ve reached a limit for sending emails
• You reached a Gmail sending limit
• You exceeded the maximum recipients

Important: These are official system caps. Gmail’s spam filters often trigger far earlier based on reputation, engagement, and list quality—long before you reach the published limits.

Official Email Sending Limits for Google Workspace Accounts (2026)

Daily Sending Limits

Important: These limits represent system capacity, not deliverability-safe ranges. Cold outreach will hit filtering long before hitting these numbers.
Google counts messages and recipients separately.

For example, a single email to 50 people counts as:

• 1 message toward the daily message limit
• 50 recipients toward the daily recipient limit

Per-Message Recipient Limits

Note: Using SMTP or API does not bypass Gmail’s filtering or reputation checks.

Total and Unique Recipient Limits (24-hour Rolling Window)

Reasons Google Enforces Email Sending Restrictions

As of 2023, Google Workspace has over nine million paying organizations. At this stage, sending limits are necessary to maintain:

• Reputation and trust between senders and recipients
• Protection against spam, phishing, and automated abuse
• Service performance and reliability across Gmail and Workspace

However, the most important point for cold outreach: Inbox filtering usually begins far below these published limits, especially if sender reputation, engagement, or warmup is weak.

To learn more, read our guide on how to prevent emails going to spam.

Common Triggers That Cause Sending Limit Errors

Google constantly evaluates sender reputation and adjusts inbox placement based on five key signals:

1. Total recipient volume per day

Gmail tracks the number of unique recipients you contact in each 24 hours and how that number changes over time. Gradual increases are interpreted as normal mailbox use. Sudden spikes increase filtering sensitivity.

Safe pattern: 20/day → 30/day → 45/day → 60/day (increases over days/weeks)

Risky pattern: 0/day → 200/day (overnight volume spike)

2. Bounce rate

A high bounce rate indicates that the contact list is unverified or stale. When many emails are sent to invalid or inactive addresses, Gmail lowers its trust in the list until the quality improves.

3. Spam complaint rate

Every “Report Spam” action is registered as an adverse trust event. Complaint rates often rise when outreach is broad, undifferentiated, or misaligned with the recipient’s intent.

4. Low positive engagement

Replies, forwards, manual “Move to Inbox” actions, and continued email opens are the strongest relevance signals of sender relevance. When these weaken, inbox placement weakens with them.

The Difference Between Official Google Workspace Email Sending Limits and Real-World Safe Limits

Google’s limits indicate the maximum amount you can send before email delivery is completely halted. But inbox placement is controlled by engagement. Most filtering happens long before you ever approach these published limits.

For cold outreach, the inbox-safe sending range is significantly lower than the official limit, and it increases gradually as positive engagement builds. This trust comes from gradual sending patterns and warmup done through real Google Workspace and Office365 inboxes—not custom SMTP networks.

Here’s how that works in practice:

What to Do If You Hit Google Workspace Email Sending Limits

There are two very different types of sending issues in Google:

• Volume-based restrictions
• Reputation-based restrictions

These look different, behave differently, and require different responses. 

A volume-based restriction, for instance, is straightforward. You exceed the documented daily recipient threshold, Google returns an error message, and outbound sending pauses for up to 24 hours.

The solution here is to wait for the limit reset simply. There’s no need to switch mailboxes or route mail through SMTP workarounds. No further adjustment is needed.

On the other hand, in a reputation-based restriction, emails continue to be sent, but they begin landing in Promotions or Spam long before the published limits are reached. This is a much more common issue, especially in cold outreach. 

Safe Sending Practices to Stay Within Google Workspace Limits

So how do you lift reputation-based restrictions?

We do that through two steps:

1. Lower your outbound cold volume

The goal is to restore a normal, conversational sending pattern inside your mailbox. If cold outreach continues, Gmail has no positive interactions to assess.

Therefore, during this stabilization period, keep the mailbox active through simple, one-to-one communication. Reply to ongoing conversations, exchange brief follow-ups, and reach out individually to contacts where a response is expected.

2. Reintroduce outreach gradually

Once your mailbox has reintroduced normal engagement patterns, begin outreach on a small scale. Maybe stick to sending 20 messages per day until you have:

• Bounce rate ≤ 3%
• Spam complaints = 0
• Positive replies ≥ 3–5% for cold outreach (or trending up)

Then increase to 30–40 per day for another 3–5 days and re-check the same signals. If filtering reappears, hold or roll back for 48–72 hours and return to one-to-one messages before trying again.

Recovery Timeline Expectations

Step-by-Step Guide to Avoid Exceeding Gmail Sending Limits

Once your domain and mailbox are stable, establish a sending architecture that consistently maintains email deliverability. The following steps will help you do that:

1. Plan the recipient math before launching

Google counts recipients, not just messages. One email sent to 50 recipients counts as 50 sends. Send it twice, and that becomes 100 sends. Therefore, use this to calculate your daily sending count:

Total Sends per Day = (Emails per Day) × (Recipients per Email)

Here’s how that translates in practice:

These numbers are well below Google’s hard limits, but that doesn’t guarantee inbox placement. For cold outreach, stay conservative: start at 10–30/day and only move toward 60–100/day once reputation and engagement are strong.

To learn more, read our step-by-step guide on the best cold email deliverability sending strategy.

2. Maintain strong authentication alignment

Google Workspace verifies each message using three email authentication standards:

• SPF authorizes the server or platform you’re sending from
• DKIM adds a cryptographic signature that confirms the message content hasn’t been altered in transit and that it truly comes from your domain
• DMARC enforces a clear policy that ties the domain and authentication results together

Google uses these signals together to confirm the identity and intent of the sender. If they’re missing or misaligned, inbox visibility drops and spam filtering becomes far more aggressive, even when recipients are engaging.

3. Keep email lists clean and updated

A clean list is one that only contains active, reachable, and recently engaged contacts. Therefore, as outreach runs, remove addresses that return a hard bounce. That way, the mailbox won’t repeatedly send emails to those that no longer exist.

Over time, you’ll also notice contacts who open or reply after two to three outreach messages across a 14–21 day period. Move them out of the active email sequence.

Next, keep your lists organized. Make sure contacts aren’t duplicated or re-queued accidentally, and review them on a regular cadence. For instance, send it weekly if you’re sending daily, or monthly if the volume is lower.

Lastly, avoid scraped or purchased lists entirely. They tend to introduce instability rather than momentum.

How MailReach Enhances Deliverability for Google Workspace Senders

Google Workspace is one of the best environments for B2B cold outreach. It’s stable, familiar, and widely accepted by mailbox providers. You continue using it as the primary platform for sending your campaigns.

Where teams run into challenges is in maintaining deliverability as volume grows. Workspace doesn’t include tools to diagnose inbox placement, monitor reputation, or protect mailboxes from early filtering signals.

That’s where a dedicated deliverability platform like MailReach becomes valuable. It operates alongside your Workspace accounts to keep them healthy while your outreach scales.

Continuously warming inbox activity across mailboxes

You can connect the mailbox to MailReach, and it starts actual email conversations with high-reputation inboxes from its network of over 30,000+ verified Google Workspace and Office 365 mailboxes. These conversations include:

• Opening the emails
• Marking them as important
• Removing them from Spam when needed
• Sending short, natural replies

The volume of these interactions ramps up gradually to avoid sudden pattern changes, which, in turn, creates a consistent history of real engagement tied to your mailbox and domain.

MailReach tracks a reputation score for each provider and sends Slack alerts if the reputation declines.

Monitoring inbox placement and spam filtering across providers

With MailReach, you can run an email placement test. You place a short code snippet inside a test email and send it to a list of inboxes provided by MailReach across Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and others. The test runs under real sending conditions so the results reflect how your actual campaigns behave.

Instead of guessing from a single inbox, MailReach checks:

• Whether each provider delivered to the Inbox or Spam
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment
• Link and HTML structure
• Blacklist status
• Spam-triggering terms in the message

The test returns direct placement results across providers, as well as specific corrections tied to your sending setup and content.

So you see, Workspace can take you far, but once outreach grows, you need a way to manage reputation and placement continuously. MailReach handles that workload in the background, keeping your mailboxes healthy while your volume increases.

Try MailReach email warmup today.