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A store owner notices that order confirmations stopped arriving around mid-afternoon. The site is fine, the orders are coming in, and the plugin that sends mail through a Gmail account shows no failure on the dashboard. What changed is that the account used its daily allowance, and Gmail has quietly stopped accepting new messages from it until a window passes.
Gmail’s sending limit is a real, published number, and it is lower than most people expect once a website shares the account with a human. I read Google’s current limit pages and the WooCommerce source on 12 October 2026, and worked out how many orders a store can take before the limit bites. If the email that fails is a bounce rather than a silent stop, Email Rejected by DMARC Policy: How to Read the Bounce and Fix the Sender covers that case instead.
The limit depends on which kind of Gmail account you send from
Two accounts get two very different ceilings. A free Gmail address stops at 500 messages a day. A Google Workspace mailbox stops at 2,000 a day, and the same table carries a per-day recipient count, which matters more than the headline figure for newsletters and mail merges.
| Limit | Free Gmail | Google Workspace |
|---|---|---|
| Messages per day | 500 | 2,000 (1,500 for mail merge, 500 on a trial account) |
| Recipients per message | 500 | 2,000 in total, at most 500 external |
| Recipients per message when sending over SMTP as a POP or IMAP user | Not stated | 100 |
| Total recipients per day | Not stated | 10,000 (1,500 for mail merge) |
| External recipients per day | Not stated | 3,000 |
| When you can send again | Within 1 to 24 hours | Up to 24 hours |
Two details in that table cause most of the confusion. First, the Workspace limits roll over a 24-hour period instead of resetting at midnight, so a burst at 3 pm is still counted at 3 pm the next day. Second, a Workspace trial account is not given the bigger numbers. Google raises the limits only after the domain has paid at least 100 US dollars in total, and says the increase can take up to 75 days to apply.
Google also says these limits can change without notice, and that an account which exceeds them may be suspended. For a business site, that is a reason to treat the figures as a ceiling you stay well under, not a target.
How quickly a WooCommerce store reaches it
A website does not send one email per customer. It sends one for each event, and a single order creates several. To get a real count instead of a guess, I listed the email classes in the WooCommerce source on 12 October 2026. There are 23 of them. Five go to the store owner, and 18 go to customers.
The three that fire on an ordinary paid and shipped order are the new-order notice to you, the processing-order confirmation to the customer, and the completed-order email to the customer. That makes three messages per order before anything else happens. A first-time customer who also gets a new-account email makes four, and a refund, a cancellation or a note from you adds more.
| Where the mail is sent from | Daily cap | Orders a day at 3 emails each | Orders a day at 4 emails each |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Gmail account | 500 | 166 | 125 |
| Hostinger Business Starter mailbox | 1,000 | 333 | 250 |
| Google Workspace mailbox | 2,000 | 666 | 500 |
| Hostinger Business Standard or Premium mailbox | 3,000 | 1,000 | 750 |
| A script using the host’s own mail function (PHP mail) | 100, and 10 per minute | 33 | 25 |
Read the table as a ceiling, because every reset email, contact form message, comment notice and plugin alert shares the same allowance. A store that expects forty orders a day is nowhere near 166, but the same mailbox is also where the owner’s own email lives, and every message you send by hand counts as well. The Hostinger figures come from the hosting provider’s own limits pages, which also say the daily rate is calculated over a rolling 24 hours and applies to each mailbox rather than to the whole domain.
What the error looks like when you hit it
The limit rarely announces itself on the site. You see one of these, usually in an SMTP plugin’s log or in a bounce:
| Code and text | What Google says it means |
|---|---|
550 5.4.5 Daily user sending limit exceeded |
The account used its daily allowance. Wait and check the sending limits page. |
550 5.4.5 Daily SMTP relay limit exceeded for user |
The per-user cap on the relay service was reached. This one is for relay setups. |
452 4.5.3 Your message has too many recipients |
Cut the number of recipients per message. |
550 5.5.3 Too many recipients for this sender |
The sender went over the recipient allowance. |
421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of email |
This is a spam-rate signal, not the plain daily cap. Google points you to its bulk sender guidelines. |
The last row is the one worth separating from the rest. A daily-limit error clears when the window passes. An unusual-rate error means Google’s filters are reacting to what your domain sends, and waiting alone will not fix it. If you send through Gmail and your mail starts failing authentication, How to Set Up DKIM in Google Workspace When Your DNS Host Fights the Long Key shows how to sign your messages properly.
Your host may be the tighter limit
The Gmail number only matters if the site sends through Gmail. Many WordPress sites do not. They send through the host’s own mail function, and that path is much stricter. Hostinger documents it plainly: scripts that use the server’s mail function are held to 10 emails a minute and 100 a day, and the provider recommends moving to SMTP once you reach that point.
A dedicated mailbox on the same host is a different product with different numbers. Hostinger’s email plans list 1,000 messages a day for Business Starter and 3,000 for Standard and Premium, with 100 recipients per message, and its free trial mailboxes are capped at 100 a day. If your site is already hosted there, check which of those figures applies to the mailbox your plugin signs in to before you compare it with Gmail.
Four ways to stay under the limit
- Keep human mail and site mail apart. Give the website its own mailbox, so a busy day on the site cannot lock you out of your own inbox.
- Count your emails per event. List the notifications your store and plugins send, then multiply by your busiest day. If the result is above half the cap, the plan is too thin.
- Turn off the ones nobody reads. Admin notices for every comment or login attempt use allowance without helping anyone.
- Move to a transactional email service when you pass about half the cap. It is built for volume, and it has its own authentication setup. SPF Records and Subdomains: How to Stay Under the 10-Lookup Limit explains how to add a sender without breaking your record.
Whichever you pick, the message still has to pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC, because Gmail applies stricter rules to bulk senders than to individuals. A mail that is under the daily cap can still be rejected for failing those checks.
Checked for accuracy on 12 October 2026 against Google’s Gmail sending limits page, Google Workspace’s sending limits page, Google’s SMTP error reference, Hostinger’s email and hosting limits pages, and the WooCommerce source code.
Etienne Basson works with website systems, SEO-driven site architecture, and technical implementation. He writes practical guides on building, structuring, and optimizing websites for long-term growth.