Need help & advice with Gmail business feature

January 21, 2014 4:43 PM

I am confused with how the "business" gmail works. I do see it costs $5 which is fine. What I am seeking is to be able to send 500+ emails a day and I am limited by a regular account.

My goal is to send an email to 500+ people preferably at the same time. This is not nor will be a newsletter, it is a direct email. I moved my gmail into mozilla thinking that would fix the issue but apparently it has not. I believe in the past I was emailing less recipients than presently.

Today I was alerted that my limit was reached. Upon a little research I see Gmail business allows the ability to send up to 2000 emails in one day, I do not mind paying $5. I already use goog docs for everything I need, Im just having this one problem. Buuuut, when I look a little further I see alot of negative comments about the gmail business.
Please explain. I dont want to get all involved in switching emails and alerting a ton of people. I just need to keep this email and send out more per day. When I send a few hundred a day it doesn't work.
Thank you so much!

posted by femmme to Technology (6 answers total)

This does not answer your question about Gmail "business" accounts, but I know the people/businesses I know who need to send mass emails have used Mail Chimp. I just checked the website, and you can send 12,000 emails for free per month to 2,000 people and the cost goes up from there. You may just want to consider an outside program instead of doing it all yourself. Gmail does limit the number you can send per day for the Google Apps accounts -- or they did as of a couple years ago. I am not sure how Google Apps email accounts differ from Gmail business accounts you speak of or if they are the same thing.
posted by AppleTurnover at 5:09 PM on January 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

Gmail is not set up (eg, whitelisting your domain like MC does) to do direct mail. Gmail is not the ideal solution for direct unsolicited mail anyway because most spam filters automatically flag gmail.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:17 PM on January 21, 2014

What about something like Constant Contact? You can configure it to look as non-newsletterish as you like.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:47 PM on January 21, 2014

Yeah, just get a different email sending service. There are lots. You can still put your gmail address as the sender/return address if you want. Google Apps for Business is a whole different thing that would give you a different email address among other things. If you just need to send large volumes of mail a dedicated service is a much better way to go.

Not to mention that usually you don't want to expose the To: list to all the recipients, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 8:29 PM on January 21, 2014

If you use Google apps (the one where you pay $5 per account per month), you can send up to 2000 emails a day for your domain. However, in my experience you can't use it for direct mail very easily. More than about 5-10 bounce-backs will lock the service so you can't send any more email AT ALL for several hours. It's great for preventing spam sending in general, but means that direct mail doesn't really work. It also spaces out your sending if you try to send more than a few hundred emails, so it might take several hours for the email to reach all your recipients.
posted by gemmy at 9:26 PM on January 21, 2014

If you're looking to send the same email (maybe with slightly varied content, like putting their name in it or something) to a bunch of people at the same time, you don't want to use Gmail. You need a service like MailChimp - I use it at work and it's super user-friendly and really affordable. Actually it's free for up to 12k recipients. Using an email marketing software will also reduce the chances that your email address and/or domain get marked as "spam" by other people/domains/ISPs.
posted by radioamy at 9:29 PM on January 21, 2014