The hourly e-mail sending limit: staying under it and moving newsletters elsewhere

The short answer: every hosting plan has a limit on e-mails sent per hour: 100 on Pro, 200 on Plus, 300 on Ultra, 500 on Business Pro, 750 on Business Plus and 1,000 on Business Ultra. That is enough for a team’s everyday mail and for the site’s own e-mails (orders, forms, password resets). It is not enough, and is not meant to be, for newsletters: those go out through a dedicated sending service, which looks after reputation, lists and unsubscribes. What most often hits the limit without anyone noticing is a form abused by bots, a cron job that sends an e-mail every time it runs, or a mailbox whose password was stolen.

Where the e-mails that use up the limit come from

Source	How you spot it	What to do
A newsletter or promotion sent from the normal mailbox	Dozens or hundreds of recipients at once, from Outlook, webmail or a cPanel mailing list	Move it to a sending service: sending a newsletter from your site.
A website form abused by bots	Many notifications per hour, with meaningless text	Protect the form: honeypot, captcha and validation.
A cron job that mails its output	The same cron message, every run	Turn the mail off with MAILTO: cron job e-mails.
A mailbox with a stolen password	Messages nobody wrote, and bounces from addresses you do not know	Change the password now: what to do in the first hour.
A shop or application sending many automatic e-mails	Legitimate confirmations and notifications, in bursts	An e-mail service or API for the notifications: SMTP or an e-mail API.
A team that has grown	Normal mail, written by people, hitting the limit during working hours	That is real use: upgrade (see below).

Staying under the limit, step by step

1	See what went out: in cPanel, Track Delivery lists the messages sent, from which address and to whom. Look for peaks and senders you do not recognise. cPanel menu names change slightly with the version and the language: look for the meaning, not the exact word.

2	If there are messages nobody wrote, deal with security first: change that mailbox’s password and follow the first-hour guide. Upgrading here would only give more sending to whoever got in.

3	Close the leaks on the site: protect the forms and switch off the cron e-mails nobody reads.

4	Give the site an address of its own (for example, site@yourcompany.com) and have WordPress send through SMTP with that mailbox (making WordPress send e-mail with SMTP). Track Delivery then shows what is the site’s and what is the team’s.

5	Move newsletters elsewhere: open an account with a sending service, authenticate the domain (SPF and DKIM) and import only people who gave consent. The site still collects the contacts; the sending happens there. The rules are in e-mail marketing without burning your domain.

6	A big announcement that cannot wait (to every customer, say): spread it over several hours, or send it through the sending service. A cPanel mailing list also uses up the limit, because each recipient gets a message.

Optimise or upgrade?

Situation	The answer
Newsletters and campaigns	Neither: a sending service. No hosting plan is built for campaigns, and sending them from the normal mailbox damages the domain’s reputation.
Spam leaving from a mailbox or a form	Security. Fix the cause; a bigger plan would only let more spam out.
Large volumes of notifications from a shop or application	Optimise: a transactional e-mail service or API. If they only go over the limit now and then, an upgrade may be enough.
The team’s normal mail hitting the limit every week	Upgrade. This is exactly what it is for.

Bigger plans

Each plan up lets more e-mails out per hour: from 100 on Pro to 1,000 on Business Ultra (table below). The number of e-mail accounts is unlimited on every plan; what is limited is how many e-mails leave per hour. Our usage warning e-mails also show e-mails per hour, with the plan’s limit and the percentage you use. You upgrade in My MozOut, under Services, on the service, at Upgrade/Downgrade; you pay only the difference until the renewal, and the site, the e-mail and the files stay where they are: how to upgrade your plan.

Plan	E-mails per hour
Pro	100
Plus	200
Ultra	300
Business Pro	500
Business Plus	750
Business Ultra	1,000

Do not try to get round the limit with more mailboxes or by spreading the sending over several addresses: the limit is not per mailbox. And bulk sending from shared hosting can put the server on blocklists, which hurts delivery of your mail and your neighbours’ (how to write an e-mail that does not land in spam).

When you go over the limit, the extra messages are usually held and retried later, and some may come back with an error notice. If a customer says your reply arrived hours late, check Track Delivery for that hour before looking for another cause.

Are your e-mails being held, or do you not know what is using up the limit? Tell us the domain and the time through a support ticket in My MozOut, and we will read the sending log with you.

Open a support ticket

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