Email sending limits and privileges

Administrators can request privileges for users who need to send large numbers of emails.

The number of emails that users can send is restricted by default to prevent the unregulated sending of large numbers of emails. If an email account is hacked it can be used to send large amounts of spam, damaging your organization's reputation. Your organization could be blocked or otherwise constrained by external internet organizations.

When an account reaches its sending limit, it's blocked until its average sending rate drops below the limit. While it's blocked, attempts to send further emails fail, and sent emails returned with an error. These measures are applied to the affected account, not the whole organization. This prevents interruption to the whole organization.

Where there's a genuine need for users to send large numbers of emails, you can ask Sophos to give bulk email sender privileges to a user.

Bulk email sending limits

Different limits apply to standard users and users with bulk email privileges. You can see the limits here, Sender rate limit.

You can only give bulk email sender privileges to a maximum of 5% of your organization's users.

Applying for bulk sender privileges

In My Products > Email Protection > Mailboxes, select a user and click Request bulk sender privileges. If bulk sender privileges have already been asked for or granted for that user, a status message appears.

Fill in and submit the form with the required information. Sophos will review the request within six hours.

You can also remove bulk sender privileges, without a Sophos review.

Monitoring bulk sending privileges

Mailboxes have a Bulk email sender privileges section in My Products > Email Protection > Mailboxes. This shows the status of a privilege application.

In Alerts, you can see users that have reached their email sending limits. You can also change the frequency of alerts for a user.