Understanding email sending limits

Last updated: July 2026

Circle applies intelligent sending limits to maintain exceptional email deliverability rates, protect our platform from abuse, and ensure all communities can successfully reach their audiences. These limits are designed to grow with your community and shouldn't impact legitimate sending patterns.

Our system uses dynamic limits that are calculated over rolling time periods. This means:

• Limits refresh continuously rather than resetting at fixed times.

• Your sending capacity adjusts based on your community's size and engagement patterns.

• As your community grows and establishes positive sending practices, your limits automatically increase.

ℹ️ Note: Email sending limits apply regardless of the domain you use to send emails. This includes both Circle’s shared domain and any custom domain set up in the Email Hub.

New communities start with conservative limits that expand as you establish a positive sender reputation. Your reputation develops naturally through:

• Consistent sending patterns.

• Good engagement rates from your recipients.

• Following email best practices.

Once established (typically after your first few broadcasts), your sending capacity increases significantly to support your community's growth.

• Growing communities: As your contact list expands, your sending limits increase.

• New communities: We understand you're eager to engage your audience. Initial limits ensure your first campaigns are successful while our system learns your sending patterns.

• High-volume senders: For communities with hundreds of thousands of contacts, we offer enterprise-grade capacity with appropriate safeguards to maintain deliverability.

Your limits increase automatically as your community grows and maintains good sending practices. However, if you need higher limits immediately for a specific campaign or event:

1. Reach out to our support team to request a higher sending limit.

2. Include in your request:

   • Your community size and growth projections.

   • Your typical sending frequency and volume.

   • The specific campaign or use case requiring higher limits.

   • Your audience engagement metrics (if available).

Our team reviews requests quickly and can often adjust limits within hours for legitimate use cases.

• Maintain list hygiene: Regularly clean your contact list to remove inactive addresses.

• Send consistently: Regular sending patterns help establish a positive reputation faster.

• Monitor engagement: High open and click rates demonstrate legitimate usage.

• Warm up gradually: For new communities, start with smaller segments before sending to your entire list.

• Plan large campaigns: For broadcasts to your entire community, consider scheduling during off-peak hours.

To protect your sender reputation, Circle automatically unsubscribes certain contacts from marketing emails. These contacts are excluded from future Email Hub broadcasts and don't count as billable Email Hub contacts.

Circle automatically unsubscribes a contact when:

• A contact unsubscribes themselves.

• An email hard bounces, meaning it can't be delivered permanently due to an invalid address or domain.

• A contact marks an email as spam.

No manual cleanup is required to stop sending to these contacts.

Our support team can help with limit increases, best practice questions, or planning your sending strategy. You don't need a specific problem to reach out, contact support anytime.