Troubleshooting Sending Limits With Gmail

Overview

Google imposes limits on the number of emails you can send within a 24-hour period. More specifically, the limit is imposed on the number of recipients per message (i.e. Sending one email to many people does not circumvent the issue) as well as the number of messages sent per day. The limits are described here at the Google support site.

For more assistance with campaign emails failing to send, refer to the Troubleshooting Campaigns Failing to Send From Email Queue article.

Symptoms

Your outbound emails are suddenly no longer being delivered to recipients even though your email settings have not changed and were working moments ago. You are using Gmail as your SMTP (Outbound) mail provider from within your Sugar instance.

Google places several limits on SMTP service which can be reviewed in detail at the link provided above. Outbound emails from Sugar include emails sent by the Emails module (sending to individuals or multiple contacts), campaigns, workflow notifications, and system notifications (e.g. record assignment notifications) combined. As you can imagine, a single gmail account used across several of these areas may reach this limit very quickly. However, Google does not display an error inside of your Sugar account, so the lockout behavior can be unexpected and seem unexplained. Therefore, it is very important to be cognizant of this limitation.

Note: Other providers impose similar limits. A summation of other providers' limitations is available here from emailaddressmanager.com.

Resolution

Within Sugar, you can modify your campaign sending settings to send fewer emails than the SMTP limit per day by going to Admin > Campaign Email Settings. However, be sure to leave some room to send other emails as well, so a setting of less than 70 messages per day might be an ideal balance. Steps for configuring Sugar to work with your email provider's limits are covered in the Troubleshooting Campaign Sending Limits article.

Additionally, upgrading to Google Apps for Business or Education will increase some of the SMTP limits. Information about upgrading your Google Apps account is available here. We also recommend discussing your specific email requirements with your Google Sales Representative.