How to send high volume cold email [beyond Gmail’s limits]

If you’re a cold emailer using any cold email platform other than mine, you’re likely subject to limits in the hundreds of emails per day. For most people, that allowance of a few hundred emails/day is enough, since it’s quite hard to find more than even 100 targeted prospects’ email addresses per day, where your message is relevant enough to the prospect that it doesn’t seem spammy.

But, let’s say you’re just that good at finding leads and capturing email addresses. Let’s go crazy here for a second and say you’ve fine-tuned a process that brings in 5,000 new email leads per day, and every day, you want to email these 5,000 email addresses and set a follow-up sequence that sends every few days until they reply. Now you’re in deep, because not only do 5,000 new email messages need to send every day, but once the follow-up schedules start to kick in, you’ll actually be sending more than 5,000 emails/day, when you take into account the original message volume and the follow-up email volume.

So, given G Suite’s limits of 2,000 emails/day and most cold email platforms’ own limits, how can you accomplish this?

You could set up multiple G Suite accounts and eventually send 2,000 emails per day per account. However, as years of experience has shown, it doesn’t always work so smoothly, and often times G Suite caps an account’s sending volume at a level much lower than 2,000 emails/day. This can work for some users but won’t work for most.

Last year, I invented a way to integrate an SMTP service or multiple SMTP servers into a high volume cold email process such that you can send as many emails as you want through an SMTP server like SendGrid, while preserving the ability to detect replies and send follow-up emails to non-responders. We do this through a little bit of inventiveness in how we relay the emails through an SMTP and sync the data back to your G Suite account.

Recent High Volume Cold Email Campaigns

Here is a sampling of recent large cold email campaigns sent by our platform in the last few weeks. Included are the number of auto follow-up stages and the open and reply rates. Some of these were distributed in daily batches via Gmail and some were sent via a third party SMTP relay.

This cold email campaign data is updated daily.

From Address	Subject	Follow-up Stages	Recipients	Open Rate	Replies	Date
shenette@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.uk	W___e B____r to D_____s t_e F____e of E_______n t__n O____d	0	7,613	95.3%	1	10/12/26
shenette@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.uk	W___e B____r to D_____s t_e F____e of E_______n t__n O____d	0	9,079	83.6%	59	10/12/26
mackenzie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	P____e S____o J__t D_____d T___r N_W P_____s L___r 3____k J__t In T__e F_r G__t G___e S_____!	2	2,392	75.3%	27	10/07/26
peter@xxxxxxx.uk	Is y__r m________p t__h w_____g f_r y__? [___i w______]	1	3,127	73.2%	1	10/12/26
outreach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	N_w R__________n S_____: We A_e H__e To H__p	3	2,070	71.4%	297	10/07/26
mackenzie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	P______s M__e f_r M_______e S______s - H_____l S_______s F_r T__s S___e of L__e	2	2,174	69.5%	10	10/13/26
communications@xxxxxx.ke	[______] N____E OF 2__6 A____L G_____L M_____G OF T_E P____________L S_____Y OF K___A	3	3,808	68.6%	51	10/13/26
shenette@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.uk	W___e B____r to D_____s t_e F____e of E_______n t__n O____d	0	19,209	67.1%	126	10/12/26
mackenzie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	G___s f_r E___________s - T________l a_d P_______l G___s To H__p W__h P___________, S____s R_____, a_d W_______e C_____t	1	3,496	64.2%	23	10/08/26
outreach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	E________t P______s f_r y__r A______d L______s	2	2,560	61.4%	0	10/12/26
katierose@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	I_________g b___: T_e P____e S___t Y_u C_n P__y A______e	1	2,597	56.9%	19	10/08/26
doga.p@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	{_______6 (___}	4	2,159	55.0%	5	10/12/26
shenette@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.uk	W___e B____r to D_____s t_e F____e of E_______n t__n O____d	0	10,311	54.7%	3	10/12/26
beth@xxxxxxxxxxxx.com	U______g E____s - C______n J_____, D____s C_p C______, a_d E______n N___t V_____y P___y	4	3,229	53.7%	37	10/12/26
katierose@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	G__t G___e P___: A D______r T__t M___s Y__r H__e S___l L__e a L____y H___l	0	2,736	52.6%	6	10/13/26
madison.h@xxxxxxx.com	A_e y_u h____g f___t d__k s___f f_r {______y N____?	4	2,222	51.6%	1	10/12/26
msheldon@xxxxxxx.com	I_______t B_____t U_____: E_____e N_w B_____t S______s B___t f_r Y__r R________t	1	2,273	51.6%	13	10/12/26
harshdeep@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	S____y y__r O_________y to C______t W______w	2	2,637	51.0%	3	10/13/26
lillian@xxxxxxxx.com	M____t A______s F_r F___h I______s	4	2,401	50.9%	5	10/07/26
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com	A___i F_______g - R_________l & C________l	1	6,156	50.8%	16	10/07/26

Steps to sending high volume cold email:

1. Set up your G Suite account, and connect it to GMass.
2. Set up a SendGrid account or any other SMTP service and subscribe based on the daily volume of emails you want to send. When determining daily volume, take into account the original message plus follow-up emails that need to go out per day.
3. Connect SendGrid, or your alternate SMTP service to GMass.
4. When you launch your cold email campaign in GMass, set the SMTP option instead of Gmail.
5. Configure your auto follow-ups.
6. Hit the GMass button to launch the campaign.

What happens next?

Even though your emails are being sent by SendGrid, you’ll still see a copy of each individual email in the Sent folder of Gmail. When someone replies, the reply will still be threaded to the same conversation as the email in the Sent folder. And if someone doesn’t reply, and a follow-up email sends automatically in a few days, that follow-up will also be threaded to the same email conversation.

But wait, I’m not technical enough to set up SendGrid!

If setting up your own SMTP service is too complicated, and you don’t want to bother with the implications of DNS records, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and all the subtleties that are recommended for deliverability, you have a couple of options:

1. Sometimes we allow users to use our SMTP service — but typically for cold email that isn’t opt-in, we don’t.
2. There’s a fiverr gig these days where someone will help you configure a SendGrid account for use with GMass.
3. You sign up for SendGrid and subscribe, and then send us your credentials and we’ll link GMass to SendGrid for you.

By the way, if you’re an advanced web developer and this all sounds to easy for you, you may want to read my technical review of SendGrid to take a look under the hood and see if you want to customize your SMTP process. That review is written specifically for advanced web developers. 

How high is our volume?

When you’re shopping different cold email platforms, ask them how much email they send. Then check our real-time counter for how much email we’ve sent. We’ve sent over 1 billion emails through Gmail and G Suite accounts. Not all of them were cold email campaigns, but a lot of them were.