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“Too many messages” error on sending

jrgb — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:07:25 GMT

Can I get some advice, please, on sending limits? I’ve set up an additional address to manage communications surrounding a friend’s funeral arrangements (ex BT engineer, ironically) as I’m his executor.

Not wishing anyone to miss his funeral, I’ve collected a *large* number of email addresses from his devices and started sending messages. Fearing SPAM issues, each message is to a single recipient and inevitably I’ve had about 35% of sends fail due to dead addresses.

Now, I’m stuck with “Too many messages” which, no doubt is a quota/throttling issue. I have time to spread the funeral notices over a few days but it would help to know what the quotas are so I steer clear of them.

Using Thunderbird as a client.

Thanks.

Re: “Too many messages” error on sending

gg30340 — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:49:53 GMT

BT appear to have a sending limit if too many individual messages are send in a short period of time however unfortunately they have not announced what that time period is but I suspect it is about an hour.

The "Too many messages" error usually clears after an hour or so but before trying again make sure that any messages stuck in the sending box are cleared,

Rather than sending the messages on an individual basis you may be better setting up a group with less than 49 recipients and send them that way. I would wait for about an hour between each group that you send to see if that works.

Re: “Too many messages” error on sending

jrgb — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:30:37 GMT

To clarify…

Send a single email, then, to 48 Bcc recipients, rather than 48 individual emails?

Sending, individually, the first 20 went pretty quick and then the transactions appeared to get throttled until it failed with the error.

Also conscious of what impact recipients’ SPAM filters will have. Tricky - I only want to send them all a one-off email with funeral arrangements so MailChimp or similar makes no sense.

A case of trying one’s best!..

Re: “Too many messages” error on sending

gg30340 — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:54:26 GMT

@jrgbwrote:
To clarify…
Send a single email, then, to 48 Bcc recipients, rather than 48 individual emails?

Send a single email with one recipient in the address field and 48 in the BCC field.

Re: “Too many messages” error on sending

licquorice — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:08:59 GMT

Alternatively, just create a Gmail address for the purpose.