How To Reply To Messages After Hitting GMail Sending Limit

Google's GMail remains the most popular free email provider over Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo's Email. But even free can cost you…if you are not careful.

No long ago, a client called me and was in a panic because he was unable to send email from his GMail account becuase it was disabled. My first thought, some mistake was made and I'll have him contact Google.

After talking to him, he read the following message sent from Google:

"Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Google Mail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Google Mail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Google Mail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us using this form to report this problem."

It turns out the client had sent an email broadcast to his customers that was addressed to over six hundreds recipients. After searching on Google, we found a Gmail policy on sending limitations that disables your account if you send a message to more than 500 recipients (see below for policy information from Google).

Now that we found the cause, and contacting Google quickly was not an option, I needed to find a solution that would allow replies to be sent from the disabled account, in case any customers had questions.

So what solution did I use. Utilizing the automatic Vacation responder which can be easily enabled in your GMail account.

Usually when messaging systems prohibits users from sending email, because of a policy or quota, it does not mean your entire mailbox is disabled. You can still receive emails, any filters that were created will still function (unless it forwards or replies), and other functions like the vacation responder (more commonly known as Out Of Office Reply) still….respond.

So I set up the vacation auto responder by clicking on the Settings link (log on to your GMail account) found next to your address.

Then in the General tab, scroll down towards the bottom to the Vacation responder: section.

We added a short message telling his customers to use an alternate address (shown in the sample above) and checked the box to Only send a response to people in my Contacts. This way, any email messages received outside of his Contact list would not get the response.

Also, by making any changes to the vacation response, after the initial setup, will make the responder start over. In other words, if someone receives your initial vacation response, and then emails you again after you've edited the subject or body of the message, they will receive the edited response.

An easy fix to what could have been a costly mistake.

Which brings us back to the GMail send limit policy. It states:

"…Google will temporarily disable your account if you send a message to more than 500 recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages. If you use a POP or IMAP client (Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, e.g.), you may only send a message to 100 people at a time. Your account should be re-enabled within 24 hours."

Note that sending a message to more than 500 recipients implies you are using Google's web based mail (GMail) and more than 100 recipients is for POP or IMAP usage.

While the lure of using free services to run your business, especially from an Internet giant such as Google, seems like a good solution, you get what you pay for…in this case service level agreements that are out of your control and non-negotiable.

As for the lesson learned by my client…his buisness was too important to trust a free service and has signed up for




. Now it's an buisness expense he can just write off.