The limits on hosted sending

Applies when your sending is: Sent by Issue MintSent by Issue Mint, from your domain

Hosted sending is included at any publishing frequency, up to the limits on this page. All of them are generous enough that most newsletters never meet one, and each one warns you well before it takes effect.

None of these limits apply if you move sending to your own Amazon SES or SMTP account. That is free to do, at any plan, and it is the answer to every limit on this page. How sending works covers why the option exists at all.

The monthly email allowance

Hosted sending allows 50,000 emails a month, or 15 for every active subscriber, whichever is the larger.

The multiplier clears weekly, twice weekly and three times weekly publishing comfortably. What it catches is daily sending to a large list, and at that volume moving to your own sending account is genuinely the better answer for you as well as for us. The floor exists so the rule never touches a small list: a thousand subscribers sending daily costs us a few dollars a month, and capping that would annoy a real publisher to protect nothing.

Issue Mint warns you at 80 per cent of the allowance, by email and on the billing page. After that there is a 30 days grace period before hosted sending stops.

The subscriber cap

Hosted sending is capped at 15,000 active subscribers per account, counted across every newsletter you run.

The warning starts at 12,000, which is where most publishers hear about their own sending account for the first time. It is a promotion rather than a threat: at that size the reputation is worth owning, and it is the same price either way, on every plan on the ladder.

At the cap there is a 30 days grace period. When it expires, hosted sending stops and nothing else does. The website, the list, the archive and the dashboard are exactly as they were, and connecting your own account starts sending again straight away.

While you are on a trial

A trial account may send 2,000 emails in total, and 500 to any single issue.

That is enough to send a real issue to a real list, and not enough to be worth abusing. Both figures are shown on the trial banner, on the billing page, and in the composer before you press send, so if your list is larger than the per-issue limit you find out while you are writing rather than at the moment you send. Subscribing lifts both immediately.

The daily ceiling on a new account

A new account may send 1,000 emails on its first day. The ceiling doubles every clean week after that, up to your plan limit.

A clean week means one with no bounce or complaint problem. Any pause resets the ceiling to where it started. This is ordinary sender warm-up: a brand-new address sending to fifty thousand people on day one is what a bought list looks like from a mailbox provider’s side, whether or not that is what it is.

The first large send

A first hosted send to more than 2,000 recipients waits for one of us to look at it before it goes out.

Below that figure, which covers nearly everybody, nothing happens and you will never know this existed. Above it, the issue moves to a held state, you are told in the composer before you press send, again in the message afterwards, and again by email. Approving it sends it. It is a one-off: once an account has had a first send approved, later sends go straight out.

The reason it exists is the warm-up ramp above. That ramp counts weeks on the calendar rather than sending history, so an account that registers and then sits quiet for a month has earned no reputation at all and would still have accrued a daily ceiling in the tens of thousands, all of it spendable on a first ever send.

When sending is paused

If your complaint rate reaches 0.1 per cent or your hard bounce rate reaches 5 per cent, hosted sending pauses. Warnings come earlier, at 0.05 per cent and 2 per cent.

Those are the numbers Amazon acts on too, which is why they are the numbers we act on first. Rates are not calculated at all until an issue has reached 500 delivered recipients, because a percentage of twenty people is noise rather than a signal.

A pause stops the current send between batches. It never tries to recall what has already gone, and it leaves the website, the list and the archive untouched. Nothing un-pauses on a timer: a person here has to release it, which is deliberate, because an automatic release is how you build a system that mails a bad list once a day for ever.