On our hosting plans, the number of outgoing emails is limited per hour. This limit is in place to prevent a compromised email account, a faulty website form or a mass mailing sent from an email account from getting the server blacklisted, as this would adversely affect the email communications of all customers on that server. The daily email volume of an average company does not come close to this limit; it is typically encountered when sending newsletters or mass mailings, or in the event of a compromised account.

What is the limit?

The limit applies per domain, per hour, and depends on the plan.

cPanel hosting

Plan

WordPress hosting

Plan

Email hosting

Plan

On dedicated cPanel servers, the limit is 300 emails per hour per domain. You can find all the plans on the pages detailing the cPanel hosting, WordPress hosting and email hosting plans.

What is included?

• All mailboxes for a domain are combined: if the info@ and szamla@ addresses belong to the same domain, messages sent from both accounts are combined.
• Website emails: order confirmations from the online shop, notifications from the contact form, and registration and password reset emails all fall under the same category, regardless of whether the website sends them via PHP or SMTP.
• Per recipient: an email sent to 50 recipients counts as 50 sendings, even if the recipients are listed in the ‘CC’ or ‘BCC’ fields.

There is no such limit on incoming emails and redirects.

What happens if you reach the limit?

The server does not send emails exceeding the limit immediately: it places some of them in a queue and attempts to deliver them again within the next hour, whilst rejecting any further emails. In such cases, you will receive a bounce email containing the message ‘has exceeded the max emails per hour’ along with your domain name.

Email delivery will resume automatically within the next hour; you do not need to do anything. However, if you require the emails that were held up, you will need to resend the rejected ones.

What should you do if you weren’t expecting this?

If you have reached the limit even though you haven’t sent many emails, it is likely that someone else is sending emails on behalf of your domain:

1. Hacked email account: change the passwords for the affected email accounts and check the Sent folder. If you see any unfamiliar emails, follow the steps in the article on hacked email accounts and report this to us. The article on 550 errors also covers emails that bounce back to unknown recipients.
2. Abuse of the website’s contact form: bots can send emails via the unsecured contact form. Enable CAPTCHA or another bot filter, and update the website’s plugins.
3. Fake sender: if you receive bounce messages for emails that were not sent from the server, the sender’s address is being spoofed. This does not count towards the limit; for information on how to protect against this, see the article on email address spoofing.

If you cannot identify the cause, please open a ticket via the client portal: we can tell you which account or script sent the emails by checking the mail log.

If you regularly need to send a large number of emails

• For newsletters and mass mailings, please use our newsletter service. Our newsletter service sends emails within a monthly quota, manages unsubscriptions and bounce addresses, and does not count towards your mailbox limit. The differences between the two services are outlined in the comparison between the newsletter service and email hosting.
• Spread out your mailings: if your email client or website plugin supports this, set a delay between emails. Sending a few emails per minute at a steady rate will keep you below the limit, and recipient providers will also handle this better than a sudden flood of emails.
• Larger plan: larger plans offer a higher hourly limit if your website sends a large number of transactional emails (such as order confirmations).

Whether you’re sending from a mailbox or a newsletter sender, you should authenticate your emails with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records; otherwise, they may end up in the recipients’ spam folders. This article discusses emails that end up in the spam folder.