Applies to: Mailboxes included with your hosting plan (all plans). Professional Email (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) follows Microsoft's or Google's own limits.
This article lists the limits for the mailboxes on your hosting plan: how many you can create, how large each one can grow, and how much mail each domain can send per hour. The sending limits protect the shared mail system: they stop a hacked mailbox or a runaway script from sending thousands of messages before anyone notices.
Limits by plan
| Plan | Mailboxes | Maximum size per mailbox | Sending limit (messages per domain, per hour) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Managed Lite | 10 | 5 GB | 50 |
| Self-Managed Plus | 50 | 10 GB | 100 |
| Self-Managed Pro | Unlimited | 10 GB | 150 |
| Managed Starter | 25 | 10 GB | 100 |
| Managed Growth | 100 | 10 GB | 150 |
| Managed Business | Unlimited | 25 GB | 250 |
Storage: mailboxes share your plan's storage
Mail is kept in your hosting account and counts toward your plan's disk space, together with your website files and databases: 10 GB on Self-Managed Lite, 50 GB on Plus, 100 GB on Pro, 40 GB on Managed Starter, 80 GB on Growth and 200 GB on Business. There is no separate allowance for mail.
- Each mailbox starts with a 1 GB quota, which you can raise up to the maximum in the table: see How to create a mailbox.
- The quota is a ceiling, not space set aside: a mailbox only takes up as much space as the mail in it.
- When a mailbox reaches its quota, or your plan's disk is full, new mail is refused: see What happens when a mailbox or your plan's storage is full.
How the hourly sending limit works
- Each domain has its own limit. If your account hosts several domains, the limit applies to each of them separately.
- Every recipient counts. A message to one person counts as one; a message to 20 people counts as 20, whether they're in To, Cc or Bcc.
- Your website's mail counts too. Contact forms, shop order emails, WordPress notifications and cron jobs send mail the same way, and it counts toward the same limit.
- Forwarded mail counts when a forwarder passes it on to an address outside our servers. It counts toward the domain the forwarder belongs to.
- Mail between mailboxes in your account doesn't count. It is delivered on our server and never leaves it.
What happens when a domain reaches its limit
- Up to the limit, mail goes out as normal.
- Past the limit, further messages wait in the queue and are retried later, so they go out with a delay.
- If sending carries on and reaches 125% of the limit within the same hour, further messages are refused. The sender gets a bounce in English saying the domain "has exceeded the max emails per hour". Those messages are not sent; send them again later.
Mail from your website or scripts is refused the same way. The bounce goes back to the sender address the script uses, which often nobody reads, so a contact form can seem to lose messages.
Limits per message
- Message size: up to 50 MB, including attachments, for mail you send and receive. Attachments grow by about a third when they're sent, so about 35 MB of attachments fill a message, and many receiving providers accept less. For large files, send a download link instead.
- Recipients: up to 50 per message.
These are the current per-message limits and may change.
Newsletters and bulk mail are not allowed
Mailboxes and your website's mail are for everyday correspondence and for messages your site sends one at a time, such as order confirmations, password resets and replies to contact forms. Newsletters, marketing campaigns and any other bulk mail must not be sent through our mail servers, whether from a mailbox or from your website, even to people who signed up for them. Our Acceptable Use Policy sets this out. Outgoing mail from every customer leaves through a shared gateway, so bulk mail from one account can harm delivery for everyone.
To send newsletters, use a dedicated sending service (an email marketing platform): it handles sign-ups, unsubscribe links and delivery at volume. If a shop or app sends a lot of transactional mail, a transactional email service can send it for your site over its own SMTP or API. Either kind of service will ask you to add DNS records for your domain: in the client area DNS manager if your domain uses our nameservers (see How to manage DNS records in your client area), or with your DNS provider. Your domain must have only one SPF record, so add the service's include: to the existing record instead of creating a second one.
If the limit gets in the way of normal mail
If your mail is being held or refused and it isn't bulk mail, open a request in our Help Center at support.maxinodes.com or email support@maxinodes.com. Tell us the domain, what is sending (a person's mailbox, a contact form, a shop, a script), roughly how many messages per hour you need, and paste the bounce message. We'll check the mail logs with you and suggest the right fix: stopping a script or form that sends more than it should, moving the volume to a dedicated sending service, or a plan with a higher limit.
Reached the limit without sending much? That is often the first sign of a compromised mailbox, or of a contact form that spammers are abusing. Change the mailbox's password, check your website's forms for spam, and tell us: we can see which address or script is sending.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.