Can email providers limit how much email I send?

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Summary: One of the techniques many mail providers use to reduce the flood of spam is to limit how much email you can send in a certain period of time.

When sending emails from my Hotmail account, I have been receiving a message at the top of my message saying I have used the maximum allowable for sending messages in a 24-hour period and then I can't send any more emails for another 24 hours. It's says nothing in their Terms of Use Policy so what gives?

Once again, I get to place the blame on a very common culprit.

Spammers.

It's all about the spammers and how we have to pay for their misbehaviors.

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Many email providers will limit the number of emails you can send in a particular period. However they may or may not tell you just exactly what those limits are. The limits are likely kept obscure so that they providers can adjust them as needed or perhaps even on a per-user basis.

The problem that they're trying to solve is twofold:

• Spammers - Spammers sometimes use services like Hotmail directly to send their buckets of email. Putting a limit on how much you can send in any particular period makes their jobs more difficult. Sending hundreds or thousands of emails, as spammers do, is much more difficult if you can't do it all at once using a single account.

• Botnets - Botnets are the result of random people's machines becoming infected and then being used to send email on the spammer's behalf. Thus any email service may face a flood of email from an infected machine. Throttling your ability to send large quantities of email is one way to battle the botnet legions.

I've even run into this in hotels when traveling. Many hotel or other free internet providers such as Wifi hotspots will capture your attempts to send email and send them through their own servers. The result is that they can enforce a limit on the number of emails you can send. The problem is that the times I've experienced it, it was a very small limit - something that an active emailer such as myself would run into.

Unfortunately there's little you can do. Perhaps a good provider may raise or remove a limit for you, but it's unlikely since it's a maintenance nightmare for them.

The only real recourse, besides waiting of course, is find another email provider with a more tolerant policy.

As for the Terms of Use (or Terms Of Service) policy, as I said it's unlikely that they would call out something as specific as number of emails that you're allowed to send. More likely is relatively vague terminology relating to spam or abuse where they can implement appropriate restrictions or policies to prevent both. By being vague about the specifics it gives them significantly more flexibility about what kinds of techniques they can use and how quickly they can implement them.

But it's still all the spammer's fault. Without them none of this would be needed.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - Why is there so much spam?

• Ask Leo! - How do I get rid of all this spam?!?!

• Ask Leo! - Are free email services worth it?

Article 12070 | Posted December 10, 2007