How many e-mails you sent this hour: Track Delivery and the sending limit

The short answer: the sending limit is 100 e-mails an hour on Pro, 200 on Plus, 300 on Ultra, 500 on Business Pro, 750 on Business Plus and 1,000 on Business Ultra. cPanel has no ready-made counter saying “you sent X of 100”: what shows you what left is Track Delivery, in the Email section. Filter by your domain, look at the send time and count the lines in the last hour: each line is a delivery to one recipient, so one message to 20 people is 20 lines. The same list shows who sent it: a person, a mailing list or a script on the site. How to use the screen for a message that never arrived is in Track Delivery; this one is about counting.

Where to see each thing

What you want to know	Where to look	What you will see
How many e-mails left in the last hour	cPanel, Email, Track Delivery	One line per recipient, with the send time (Sent Time), the sender and the result.
Who sent them	The Sender column, on the same screen	The address that sent. A sender made of the cPanel username and the server name is usually a site script using PHP mail().
Whether any message was held back by the limit	The Result and Event columns	Deferred or refused messages, with text that mentions max emails per hour.
What the team sent by hand	The Sent folder of each mailbox, in webmail	The messages people wrote. It does not show what scripts and lists sent.
What your plan allows	This article, the plans page, or what is unlimited and what has a limit	100, 200 and 300 an hour on Pro, Plus and Ultra; 500, 750 and 1,000 on Business Pro, Plus and Ultra.

cPanel menu names change slightly with the version and the panel language: look for the meaning, and type the name into the cPanel search box if you cannot spot it.

Counting the last hour’s sends, step by step

1	Open Track Delivery in cPanel, Email section.

2	Set the clock. Send a test message to one of your addresses outside the domain and find it in the list. The time shown tells you which time zone the screen uses, and so which lines belong to “the last hour”.

3	Show only what matters. Keep successful, deferred and failed deliveries switched on, and type your domain into the filter. That leaves only what your mailboxes and your site sent, without the mail you received.

4	Sort by send time (Sent Time), newest first, and count the lines in the last 60 minutes. Each line is one recipient.

5	See who weighs most. Filter by each sender that appears many times. A person’s address, a mailing list address or the cPanel user (a script) tell different stories: see the table below.

6	Look for messages held back. Deferred or refused lines with text about max emails per hour tell you the account went over the limit in that hour. What happens to a deferred message is in errors 421 and 451.

7	Repeat at a busy hour. A count at 10 in the morning on a working day says more than one on a Sunday night. If you are often close to the limit, the next step is the hourly e-mail sending limit.

How to read what you found

What you see	What it usually is	What to do
A few lines, spread over the day, from people on the team	Normal use.	Nothing.
Many lines at the same hour, from the same sender, to different recipients	A newsletter or bulk send from an ordinary mailbox, or a cPanel mailing list (mailing lists).	Move bulk sending to a dedicated service: sending a newsletter from your site.
Many lines with the cPanel user as sender	A site script: a form, a shop, a cron job.	Protect the form (a spam-free form) or switch off the cron e-mail (cron job e-mails).
Messages nobody wrote, recipients you do not know, lots of bounces	A mailbox with a stolen password.	Change the password now: what to do in the first hour.
Deferred lines with “max emails per hour”	The account went over the limit in that hour.	Waiting does not fix the cause: find the sender that sent the most.

Optimise or upgrade?

Situation	Optimise or upgrade?
The limit is reached by newsletters or campaigns	Neither: a dedicated sending service. No hosting plan is built for campaigns.
The limit is reached by spam from a form or a hijacked mailbox	Security first. A bigger plan would only let more spam out.
A script sends a message for every event, even when nobody reads them	Optimise. Cut the sends that serve no purpose.
Mail written by people, getting close to the limit in working hours, every week	Upgrade. The team has grown.

Bigger plans

Plan	E-mails per hour
Pro	100
Plus	200
Ultra	300
Business Pro	500
Business Plus	750
Business Ultra	1,000

From Pro to Business Ultra, the limit goes from 100 to 1,000 e-mails an hour (table above). Our usage warning e-mails also show e-mails per hour, with the plan’s limit and the percentage you use. The number of e-mail accounts is unlimited on every plan; what has a limit is how many e-mails leave per hour. You upgrade in Meu Interweb, pay only the difference up to the renewal date, and the mailboxes, the messages and the site stay where they are: how to upgrade your plan. How to cut sending before you decide: the hourly e-mail sending limit.

Track Delivery does not keep its history forever. Count while the problem is happening, or right after, and take a screenshot if you are going to ask us for help. And if you find messages nobody wrote, change that mailbox’s password before anything else.

Give each source its own sender. If the site sends from an address of its own and each person from theirs, the Sender column tells you at once who is using up the limit. A script using PHP mail() shows up as the cPanel user and blends in with everything: mail() or SMTP in PHP.

Counted and still cannot tell who is using up the limit, or have messages held back? Open a support ticket with the domain and the time.

Open a support ticket

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