Email Sending Limits

Email Sending Limits are designed to prevent your email accounts from exceeding the sending thresholds set by your email providers. These limits not only safeguard your accounts from potential disconnection from Close and interrupting your email sending, but also help maintain your sender reputation and avoid spam-related issues.

Setting Up Your Limits

By default, these sending limits are disabled, but Organization Admins with the Manage organization permission can easily enable them by heading to Settings > Email > Sending Limits. Enabling these limits will impact all Connected Accounts for all users in the organization - so each Connected Account will be under the limits for their email provider.

Once enabled, users within that Organization gain control over defining the maximum hourly, daily, and minimum delay limits for automated emails, including bulk emails and Workflow emails.

Understanding sending limits

In order to determine your limits, Close will check to see what sort of email account you have.

If you use Gmail or Office365 as your email provider, then your daily limits can be set as low as 500. These limits are determined by your email provider, depending on what tier of account you have. These are referred to as Regular Email Accounts.

Providers such as Mailgun and SendGrid are considered Mass Email Accounts. These accounts are typically capable of sending more than a Regular Email Account, and are more useful for anyone expecting to send bulk emails to 500+ leads at a given time.

Based on your email provider, Close defaults to the following limits:

For Regular Email Accounts (Gmail, Office365, etc):

• Daily Sending Limit (24 hour) - 200 emails
• Hourly Sending Limit - 20 emails
• Minimum Delay between emails - 60 seconds

For Mass Email Accounts (Mailgun, SendGrid, etc):

• Daily Sending Limit (24 hour) - 2,500 emails
• Hourly Sending Limit - 500 emails

These default settings can be adjusted.

If Close is able to determine your email provider we automatically apply limits based on your email provider's restrictions, even if your Email Sending Limits are not enabled in your Settings. This acts as a safeguard for your email reputation, particularly for standard email accounts like Gmail or Outlook, which are more susceptible to email sending restrictions.

Once Email Sending Limits are enabled, Close automatically regulates the sending of bulk emails and Workflow email steps to ensure compliance with the defined limits. So, for example, if your daily sending limit is set to 100, and you send a bulk email to 500 contacts, Close will send 100 emails a day over the next 5 days.

Manual and API emails, such as sent via Zapier, are exempt from these restrictions and will behave as if Email Sending Limits are turned off.

Email Service Provider Limits

Below are the known technical limits of regular email service providers.

Mass email service providers have different limits. If you use a mass email server, reach out directly to your provider to find out the specific details of your sending limits.

To account for any emails sent manually (not in a bulk email or a Workflow step), Close adds a 10% buffer to each email service provider limit. We include this buffer so you can still send out manual response emails to your leads, even if you have sent out the maximum amount of bulk emails allowed by your email service provider in a given time period. For example, if you use Gmail, Close will include a 10% buffer for the 2,000 daily limit, which means you can send up to 1,800 bulk emails or Workflow email steps, and up to 200 manual emails sent directly from the Lead page.

Email Sending Priority

Close does not prioritize sending order. This means enrolling a large number of contacts into multiple Workflows or sending bulk emails simultaneously can lead to competition for sending slots, potentially causing delays.

This means it's possible for a bulk email that was initiated at 9:00 AM could send after a bulk email that was initiated at 3:00 PM. However, the order for your Workflow email steps will not be impacted - Step 2 will never be sent before Step 1.

So, before initiating sizable email campaigns, it's wise to first complete any other bulk updates to leads or contacts (such as updating lead statuses or custom fields). This approach prevents these emails from dominating the processing queue, delaying other tasks.

If an email waits in the sending queue for 7 days, we'll send that email to an Error status. You can search for all emails with the Error status under the Email filter on the Leads page.

Monitoring your Limits

Users can see the daily and hourly limits under Settings > Accounts & Apps, within each email Connected Account.

If a limit is close to being met, the bars will turn red, signifying that Close is queuing up emails due to nearing the limit. This could mean that a bulk email is processing and sending has paused due to your limitiations, or some Workflow email steps are being are waiting to be sent out once your limits allow.

The daily sending limit is on a rolling 24-hour period. This means that the limits apply to Workflow and bulk emails sent within the past 24 hours at that time.

Bulk Email Processing

When you initiate a bulk email to, say, 10,000 leads, Close follows a structured process:

• Checking for Pending Emails: Close will first check if there are any pending emails to be sent out.
• Queue Verification: If there are pending emails, Close will verify whether we can proceed with sending them immediately or we should wait due to the email sending queue being full.
• Sending Emails: Upon being cleared to send an email, Close will send the email and place it in the email account's Outbox for delivery.
• Repeat: The process repeats, starting again from the top if there are still pending emails to be sent.

If the sending queue becomes full midway through a bulk email, you'll see a Processing status, with approximately half of the emails sent. Meanwhile, the remaining emails await their turn to be sent. Pending emails that have yet to be sent won't be visible on the lead page until they're queued up to send.

Keep in mind that any other bulk actions (bulk edit, bulk delete, bulk subscribe/pause/resume) - will share the same queue as your bulk email processing. This means that if your "Minimum delay between emails" is set too low, or you're sending too many emails for your set limits, your bulk email action will be processing for hours, if not days - and all the other bulk actions will wait in the queue.

For example, if your minimum delay between emails is set to 60 seconds, and you send an email to 1,440 leads, your bulk email action will be processing for at least 24 hours straight. Only once this bulk email is done sending to your leads, other bulk actions can start, one at a time.

Workflow Subscription Processing

This follows a similar logic to bulk emails. Using the same example of enrolling 10,000 leads into a Workflow, you'll see the following:

• Checking for Email Step: Close will check whether the designated email step should be sent based on the Workflow schedule.
• Queue Verification: If it's the right time to send, we check if the email can send at that time or if we need to wait due to a busy queue.
• Send Email Step: Close will create and send the email step.
• Repeat: Go back to step 1 to evaluate any remaining email steps.

When enrolling leads into Workflows, Close enrolls all leads upfront. We'll potentially hold off on sending email steps until the sending queue is clear.