The Most Common Cold Email Question
If you’re getting into cold email, you’ve probably wondered: “How many emails can I actually send in a day?”
It’s a reasonable question. After all, you want to reach as many prospects as possible without getting your account shut down or your emails landing in spam. But here’s the thing most people get wrong: this isn’t really about what you can send. It’s about what you should send if you want those emails to actually reach the inbox.
I’ve seen it happen dozens of times. A sales rep gets excited, loads up their brand-new email account with a list of 500 prospects, and hits send on everything at once. Within 24 hours, their emails are bouncing, their domain reputation is tanking, and Gmail has flagged their account for suspicious activity. Three weeks of work, gone.
The truth is, email providers like Gmail, Microsoft, and others are extremely good at detecting unnatural sending patterns. When a brand-new account suddenly starts sending 200 emails a day, it looks exactly like what it is: automated outreach. And even though cold email is perfectly legal, providers don’t want their platforms used for mass sending without proper reputation building.
So let’s dig into the real numbers, the safe limits, and most importantly, how to scale your cold email volume without burning your accounts or your domain.
Understanding Email Provider Limits
First, let’s talk about the technical limits. These are the hard caps that email providers place on how many emails you can send per day. But spoiler alert: you should never get anywhere close to these numbers with cold email.
Gmail’s free accounts allow 500 emails per day. Google Workspace bumps that up to 2,000 emails daily. Microsoft 365 and Outlook technically allow 10,000 emails per day, but there’s a recipient limit of 500. If you’re using a custom SMTP provider, the limits vary widely depending on your plan and provider.
Here’s the critical part: these limits are designed for all types of email. They’re meant to accommodate businesses sending newsletters to customers, teams collaborating on projects, and yes, some outreach. But they’re not an invitation to send 2,000 cold emails from a single account.
For cold email specifically, the safe range is 30-50 emails per account per day, regardless of what your technical limit is. If your account is brand new, you should start even lower at 10-20 emails per day and gradually ramp up over several weeks.
Why such a conservative approach? Because deliverability isn’t just about staying under the technical limit. It’s about building a reputation with email providers as a legitimate sender. When you send too many emails too quickly, especially from a new account, you trigger spam detection algorithms that can permanently damage your sender reputation.
The Safe Sending Formula for New Accounts
Let’s say you just set up a new Google Workspace account and you’re ready to start your cold email campaign. You might be tempted to jump straight to sending 50 emails a day, but that’s a recipe for disaster.
Instead, think of it like training for a marathon. You don’t run 26 miles on day one. You build up gradually, letting your body adapt to the increased workload. Email accounts work the same way.
For the first week, stick to 10-20 emails per day. This gives email providers a chance to observe your sending patterns and see that you’re getting normal engagement. Some people will open your emails, maybe a few will reply. This positive engagement signals that you’re a real person sending legitimate emails, not a spam bot.
In week two, you can increase to 20-30 emails per day. By week three, you’re looking at 30-40 emails daily. And by week four, you can settle into the optimal range of 40-50 emails per day. After that, maintain this consistent volume.
If your account has been around for a while and you’ve been using it for regular business email, you can ramp up a bit faster. An account that’s one to two months old can often handle 30-50 emails per day after a shorter warmup period. Accounts that are three months or older might be able to push to 50-75 emails per day safely, though I rarely recommend going above 50.
Here’s a hard rule that has no exceptions: never send more than 100 emails per account per day, no matter how old the account is or how good your deliverability has been. The risk simply isn’t worth the marginal increase in volume.
How to Scale Your Cold Email Volume the Right Way
Now we get to the part where most people make mistakes. You’ve followed the safe sending formula, your account is warmed up, and you’re sending 50 emails a day. But your sales goals require you to reach 500 prospects per day, not 50. What do you do?
The wrong answer is to crank up the volume on your existing account. I’ve seen companies try this, and it never ends well. One account sending 500 emails per day is a giant red flag to email providers. Your account will get suspended, your domain reputation will plummet, and you’ll spend weeks trying to recover.
The right answer is to add more accounts and distribute the volume across them. Instead of one account sending 500 emails, you set up 10 accounts that each send 50 emails per day. Same total volume, completely different risk profile.
This is called inbox rotation, and it’s the foundation of scaling cold email safely. When you distribute your sending across multiple accounts, each individual account maintains a natural sending pattern. The providers see 50 emails per day, which looks perfectly normal, instead of 500 emails per day, which looks like spam.
Here’s what this looks like at different scales. If you want to send 100 emails per day total, you need two to three accounts sending 40-50 each. For 250 emails per day, use five to six accounts. To hit 500 emails daily, you’ll need 10-12 accounts. And if you’re aiming for 1,000 emails per day, plan on using 20-25 accounts.
Notice the pattern? You’re not increasing the per-account volume. You’re multiplying the number of accounts.
The Multi-Domain Strategy for Serious Scale
When you’re sending thousands of emails per day, spreading the volume across accounts isn’t enough. You also need to protect your domain reputation by using multiple domains.
Think about it this way: if you’re sending 1,000 emails per day from 20 different email accounts, but they’re all on the same domain, you’re still concentrating a lot of volume on that single domain. If something goes wrong with deliverability, your entire operation shuts down.
A better approach is to use four to five domains, with four to five email accounts per domain. So for 1,000 emails per day, you might have four domains, five accounts per domain totaling 20 accounts, each sending 50 emails per day.
This strategy has multiple benefits. First, it distributes your reputation risk. If one domain starts having deliverability issues, your other domains keep running. Second, it looks more natural to email providers. A single domain sending 1,000 cold emails per day is suspicious. Four domains each sending 250 emails looks like four different small businesses doing outreach. Third, it makes recovery easier if something does go wrong. You can pause one domain, fix the issues, and keep your pipeline flowing with the others.
Warning Signs You’re Sending Too Much
Even if you’re following all the best practices, you need to monitor your metrics closely. Email deliverability is dynamic. What works today might not work next month if list quality declines or if email providers change their algorithms.
Watch for these red flags at the account level. If your bounce rate climbs above 5%, you either have list quality issues or your sender reputation is suffering. Reduce your sending volume immediately and verify your list. If you’re getting spam complaints, meaning recipients are actively marking your emails as spam, that’s a serious problem. Cut your volume, improve your targeting, and review your email content.
Sending delays are another warning sign. If your email tool shows that emails are taking longer than usual to send, the provider might be throttling you because they’re suspicious of your sending patterns. And of course, if your account gets suspended, stop everything and go through a proper warmup process before trying again.
At the domain level, pay attention to inbox placement. If you notice that your emails are increasingly landing in spam folders instead of primary inboxes, your domain reputation is taking a hit. Reduce volume across all accounts on that domain. If you find your domain on a blacklist, that’s a critical issue that requires immediate remediation. Stop sending, identify the cause, and follow the blacklist’s delisting process.
Low open rates can also indicate deliverability problems. While open rates aren’t perfect metrics, a sudden drop often means your emails are going to spam. Pause your campaigns and diagnose the issue before continuing.
Spreading Your Sends Throughout the Day
Here’s a mistake that even experienced cold emailers make: they schedule all their emails to go out at the same time. Maybe it’s 9 AM because that’s when they think people check email. Or maybe it’s just whenever they happened to click send.
The problem is that sending 50 emails at exactly 9:00 AM looks robotic because it is robotic. Real people don’t send emails in perfect batches. They send them throughout the day as they work through their tasks, have conversations, and follow up on leads.
Email providers know this. They’re looking for natural human behavior. When you send emails in bursts, it’s a signal that you’re using automation, which makes them more likely to filter your messages.
Instead, spread your daily volume across business hours. If you’re sending 50 emails, have them go out between 9 AM and 5 PM in the recipient’s time zone, with randomized intervals between sends. Most cold email tools can do this automatically. This creates a natural pattern that’s much less likely to trigger spam filters.
Speaking of time zones, this is another important consideration. If you’re reaching out to prospects across the country or around the world, you want your emails arriving during their business hours, not at 2 AM their time. A 2 AM email screams automation. Business hours emails look normal.
Also, consider your day-of-week patterns. Monday through Thursday are generally safe for normal volume. Friday you might want to reduce slightly, as many people are wrapping up their week and less engaged with email. Saturday and Sunday should be minimal to no sending unless you’re in a specific industry where weekend communication is normal.
Calculating Your Actual Volume Needs
Before you set up 20 email accounts and start sending thousands of emails per day, ask yourself: do you actually need that much volume?
I’ve worked with companies that were convinced they needed to send 500 emails per day, when in reality, their pipeline goals only required 100 emails per day. They were planning to waste time and money on infrastructure they didn’t need, and potentially expose themselves to unnecessary deliverability risk.
Here’s how to calculate your actual needs. Start with your end goal. How many meetings do you need to book per month to hit your sales targets? Let’s say you need 10 meetings per month.
Next, work backwards using your expected conversion rates. If your reply rate is around 10% (which is solid for cold email), and about half of your replies are positive, that’s a 5% positive reply rate. Of those positive replies, maybe 50% turn into actual meetings.
Now do the math: 10 meetings divided by 0.5 equals 20 positive replies needed. Twenty positive replies divided by 0.05 equals 400 total emails needed per month. Four hundred emails divided by 20 working days equals 20 emails per day.
For this scenario, you only need one email account sending 20 emails per day. That’s completely manageable and very safe from a deliverability perspective.
But you should build in a safety margin. Double your calculation to account for testing, optimization, bad days, and list quality issues. So 40 emails per day, which still fits comfortably in one account.
Only when your pipeline goals genuinely require more volume should you scale up to multiple accounts. This keeps your operation simple, your costs down, and your deliverability risk low.
Common Volume Mistakes to Avoid
Let me share some real scenarios I’ve seen that you’ll want to avoid.
There’s the eager sales development rep who maxes out their technical limits right away. They see that Google Workspace allows 2,000 emails per day and think, “Great, I’ll send 500.” Within a week, their account is flagged, their emails are going to spam, and their domain reputation is damaged. The fix is simple but often ignored: stay at 30-50 per account no matter what the technical limit says.
Then there’s the company that ramps up too fast. They launch a new email account and immediately schedule 100 emails per day because they’re in a hurry to fill their pipeline. The account gets flagged as suspicious within days, and deliverability tanks. Patience pays off. Ramp slowly over three to four weeks.
Another common mistake is skipping warmup entirely. I get it. Warmup takes time, usually two to three weeks of gradually increasing send volume with engagement simulation. But sending cold emails from a completely cold account is almost guaranteed to land you in spam. The warmup investment is worth it.
Some companies put all their volume on one domain because it’s simpler. But when you’re sending 1,000 emails per day from a single domain, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If that domain’s reputation gets hit, your entire operation stops. Spreading across multiple domains provides insurance.
Finally, there’s ignoring warning signs. When bounce rates climb or spam complaints start rolling in, some companies just push through, hoping things will improve. They don’t. If you’re seeing negative signals, reduce your volume immediately and diagnose the issue. Continuing to send at high volume when your deliverability is failing just makes the problem worse.
Volume Varies by Campaign Type
Not all email campaigns are created equal from a volume perspective. The type of outreach you’re doing should influence how much you send.
For pure cold prospecting where you’re reaching out to people who have never heard of you, stick to the conservative 30-50 emails per account per day. This is the highest-risk category because you have no existing relationship. You need to be extra careful to maintain good sender reputation.
Follow-up sequences targeting people who haven’t responded to your initial email should count toward your daily totals. Don’t think of these as separate. A follow-up is still cold email and carries the same deliverability risks.
Re-engagement campaigns to old leads or cold segments of your list should actually be gentler, more like 20-30 emails per account per day. These contacts are even less engaged than fresh prospects, which means higher risk of spam complaints or low engagement that hurts your reputation.
On the flip side, if you’re emailing existing customers or genuinely warm contacts who’ve engaged with you before, you can safely go a bit higher, maybe 50-75 emails per account per day. The positive engagement history with these contacts gives you more leeway.
Tools and Their Specific Recommendations
Most modern cold email tools have built-in features for managing send volume across multiple accounts. Let’s talk about how to configure them properly.
With tools like Instantly and Smartlead, you can set per-account limits in the settings. I recommend configuring each account to send 40-50 emails per day and enabling their inbox rotation features, which automatically distribute your campaigns across all connected accounts.
Lemlist allows you to set limits at the campaign level. Make sure you’re accounting for the total volume across all campaigns per account, not just individual campaign limits. Also check your pricing tier, as higher tiers typically allow more connected accounts, which is how you scale safely.
Apollo has send limits that vary by tier. Free accounts are capped at 250 emails per month total, while paid tiers offer higher limits. Regardless of your tier, stick to 30-50 emails per account per day. Just because your plan allows more doesn’t mean your deliverability can handle it.
Key Takeaways
Managing your cold email volume is one of the most critical factors in maintaining good deliverability and actually reaching your prospects’ inboxes. Here’s what you need to remember:
Send 30-50 emails per account per day as your target range. This is the sweet spot that balances productivity with safety across all email providers.
New accounts should start low at 10-20 emails per day and ramp up gradually over three to four weeks. Jumping straight to high volume will get you flagged as spam.
Never exceed 100 emails per account per day, regardless of how old your account is or what your technical limits allow. The risk to your deliverability simply isn’t worth it.
When you need to scale your volume, add more sending accounts rather than increasing the per-account volume. Use inbox rotation to distribute your campaigns across multiple accounts safely.
Pay attention to provider limits for context: Gmail free accounts allow 500 per day, Google Workspace allows 2,000 per day, and Outlook allows 300 recipients per day. But remember, these are technical limits, not recommendations for cold email volume.
The math is simple: more accounts equals more volume safely. One account at maximum safe volume is better than one account being pushed to dangerous levels. Ten accounts at safe volume is better than trying to do everything through one or two accounts.
Cold email success isn’t about sending the most emails possible. It’s about sending the right number of emails in a way that protects your reputation, reaches the inbox, and generates real conversations with prospects.
Need Help Scaling Cold Email?
Getting your cold email volume strategy right is critical, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. You also need great targeting, compelling copy, proper technical setup, and ongoing optimization.
We’ve helped hundreds of B2B companies scale their cold email operations safely and effectively. If you want expert guidance on building a cold email system that actually fills your pipeline without risking your deliverability, book a call with our team. We’ll review your current setup, identify opportunities for improvement, and show you exactly how to scale your outreach the right way.