Email Sending Limits

In UAlbany Mail, there are some limits on the amount of email you can send.

Recipient Limit (Total)

 Each UAlbany Mail mailbox can send to 2,000 recipients per 24 hour period. Once you hit that limit, you will receive new mail, but you will be unable to send new mail until ITS unblocks your account. 

• Each email address in the To:, CC:, or BCC: field counts as a recipient.

• If you have a forward setup for the mailbox, then each forward counts against the limit.

• Each Out of Office message counts against the limit.

• CC'ing yourself on every message counts against the limit.  When you send a message, a copy is already saved in your Sent Items folder by default. 

• Personal Contact Groups that you create in your own mailbox, which do not appear in the Global Address List (GAL) count as the number of members in the group.  So, if you have 50 addresses in a Personal Contact Group and you send one email to that group, it will count as 50 recipients.

• Each Listserv list only counts as one recipient even if there are many addresses subscribed to that list.  

• Each Distribution Group in the GAL only counts as one recipient, even if there are many addresses in that Distribution Group.

  • If you click on the plus symbol to expand a distribution group in the To field, for example, you are now replacing that one address with all of the individual addresses within the group.  It will warn you of this.

• The recipients in the message count against the 2,000 limit for the mailbox where the Sent Item lands.  In cases where you are emailing from a shared departmental mailbox, the Sent Item may land in your own mailbox and count against your own limit rather than the shared departmental mailbox limit if you are sending it from within your own Outlook profile.  Please use the Outlook on the web or a separate Outlook profile for the shared departmental mailbox if you wish the recipients to count for the shared departmental mailbox rather than your own mailbox.

• If you are using Outlook or another mail client, you will receive an email message back from System Administrator when you send a message that would take you over the limit.  This message that cannot be customized will report that your message was not sent to some or all of the recipients.  Your message will not have been delivered to any of the intended recipients.  It will not explain that this is a result of the recipient limit.

• If you are using OWA, it will clearly warn you about attempting to go over the limit when you click Send.

• The system will let you send messages until you reach 2,000 recipients in total over the previous 24 hours, then the restriction on sending will be enforced.  If you are at 950 and try to email to another 100 in one message, the message will fail entirely and you will be warned as described above, but you may still send to another 50 recipients if you wish.

• There is no way for you to report on your current recipient count for the previous 24 hours.

Recipient Limit (Per Message)

A single message can be sent to up to 500 recipients.

• Each email address in the To:, CC:, or BCC: field counts as a recipient.

• Each Listserv list only counts as one recipient even if there are many addresses subscribed to that list.  

• Each Distribution Group in the GAL only counts as one recipient, even if there are many addresses in that Distribution Group.

  • If you click on the plus symbol to expand a distribution group in the To field, for example, you are now replacing that one address with all of the individual addresses within the group.  It will warn you of this.

Size Limits

• Each message sent from a UAlbany Mail mailbox can be no larger than 25 MB. 

• Each attachment in a message sent from a UAlbany Mail mailbox via Outlook Web App (OWA) can be no larger than 10 MB.

Sending Rate Limit

• Sending of messages from a UAlbany Mail mailbox is limited to a maximum of 30 messages per minute.

For more detailed information, Microsoft-provided articles detail these limits:

• Bulk E-Mail and Daily Recipient Rate Limits (Information on that page regarding "Office 365 Education E3/E5" is what applies to UAlbany Mail.)

Solutions for sending messages to multiple recipients

For UAlbany community members who need to send email to large groups of people at once or very often, there are some options:

• LISTSERV lists: Can be requested by any permanent faculty/staff of the University.  There are no limits on the number of subscribers on a list.  Owners of a Listserv list can manage the membership of their lists themselves.  Listserv lists do not appear in the GAL (Global Address List).

• Public Distribution Groups: Can be requested by any permanent faculty/staff of the University.  The Distribution Groups may only contain people or groups listed in the GAL (Global Address List).  These Distribution Groups will be visible in the GAL.  Managers of these Distribution Groups can manage the membership of their groups themselves and can also control who may send email to the group.

• Brightspace: Faculty using Brightspace can use the system to email students in their courses. If you are unfamiliar with the Brightspace email feature, please visit Communicate using Email. Messages sent through Brightspace are not subject to these limits.

• MyUAlbany: Faculty and advisors can use MyUAlbany's web self-service to email their students and advisees directly from their course list. Messages sent through MyUAlbany are not subject to these limits.

Note: For applications and scripts running on University servers that need to send messages directly via SMTP, access to a UAlbany-hosted SMTP server is available upon request. Please note that this service is expressly designed for servers only; not individual mail accounts.

 Which solution is right for you?