Notes on Sending and Receiving Emails with Gmail

Do you know how many messages you can send per day or can receive per hour? How Gmail categorizes your incoming messages and check for spammed ones? This quick article will introduce some main points that we should know about when using Gmail service to send and receive emails.

Sending Limits

• Gmail allows attaching file up to 25Mb while total size of a message must not be larger than 50Mb. If you want to send larger file attachment, you need to use Google Drive or other file sharing services. More information on sending file attachments with Gmail can be read at notes on Gmail file attachments article in the issue 46.
• The limited number of messages per email or per day is 500. You need to wait for other 24 hours to be able to resend. Gmail sets this limitation in order to avoid users to send spammed messages. Gmail also advices users to create a Google group to send bulk emails in such case.
• Making sure your recipient email addresses are up to date. If you have multiple email addresses, you might consider verifying if those email addresses are valid or not. One of the best and most affordable email verification services is the Quick Email Verification. This service is quite useful for those who are running the email list like newsletter, email discussions etc. to check for their valid email addresses of subscribers.
• If you are in situation that your message is delayed or not arrived into recipient’s mailbox, let check if it’s in your Sent or Draft folder. If not, you might delete it before sending out. In some cases, the recipient’s email server might reject your message or be marked as the spam. You should ask the recipient to check with their email service provider or check in their spam/junk folder. You should ask them to add your email address to their address book or mark your message as not-spam so next time, all messages from you will go directly into their inboxes. Google also advices you to use their Gmail app or visit their web mail interface to send email in order to address this issue.

Receiving Limits

• As you are using Gmail service, so you should pay attention to the limits are applied for sent email as well. Gmail allows each email account to receive up to 60 messages per minute, 3600 messages per hour and 86,400 per day. If exceeding this limit, you might need 24 hours to have it automatically reset and resume receiving email. Please note, all messages sent to you during this suspension time cannot be recovered.
• If you don’t want to receive message from someone else like from advertisement agents or newsletter, firstly, find the unsubscribe option to request removing your email from their list. If not successful, if you believe it as the spammed mail as you haven’t subscribed for that email list, you might report it as spam. Next time, all messages from that sender will be automatically moved to your spam folder. Gmail also has a powerful spam detection tool but not all the time it does the correct filter.
• Gmail divides your messages into classifications, the primary (person-to-person communication message), social, promotions, updates and forums. You can turn on or off to let Gmail automatically filters these kinds of messages and put it in priority.
• If any messages look suspicious, please don’t reply or open any links from that message. Gmail has the feature for you to report such suspicious messages for further investigation. Gmail has the internal system to learn from users’ experiences based on their reports in order to improve its message spam filter.

I hope some notes above would be helpful for your effective use of Gmail service to send and receive emails.