by a Thinker, Sailor, Blogger, Irreverent Guy from Madras

500 email Sending Limit in Gmail


I have often heard of this ‘500’ email cap supposedly imposed by Google on all the normal Gmail accounts - the paid Google Apps has different, much more relaxed caps.  Google claims that it is an effort to fight spam and prevent abuse.  Once the cap is reached, the account gets locked out for a period of time.

Though there is much noise regarding this feature, I had never come across someone actually hitting this limit.  BTW, I always thought that 500 emails in 24 hours is good enough, for a normal, non-spammer.

How wrong I was.  The hammering this blog received with the Yajur Upakarma download proved all those heartburns are real.  It was a pain to try and switch to a different ID once the users hit the wall.

Here is a snapshot of the notification when one ID was locked out.

gmail_limit_500_messages

Look at that.  At 22:13 IST on 19th August, the Google Form failed to respond and started to log the failures, till I noticed and switched ID.

Which brings us to the issue of sending limits.  In this day and age, when much better spam filters are available, it is absolutely crazy to impose a 500 email sending limit on a normal Gmail account. 

This is as stupid as the arbitrary 100 SMS per day imposed by the GoI/TRAI in Oct ‘11.  As I wrote on the very first day, 250 to 350 SMS seems to be the average for the mobile-enabled kids in India today - and the TRAI did acknowledge that, by raising the cap to 200 SMS per day.

Couple of months later, they removed the limit of transactional SMS, which was another point raised in my post.

Similarly, Google should wake up and face the facts.  The cap should be set higher - if not same as for Google Apps (2000).  Alternately it may be alright to impose a cap of even 500, provided messages that are generated from a Google Form are totally exempted. 

I mean, do they think a spammer is going to manually enter names and email addresses in a Google Form?

Come on Google, Wake Up!  Don’t make our TRAI look good.
:-D

1 comment:

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