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Size Limits for Google Workspace (Gmail) Accounts (Faculty/Staff/Students)

Vendors may change mailing parameters at any time. If you need more information about mailing limits or other parameters not defined here, refer to Google’s documentation for sending limits and receiving limits.

Mailbox Size

The default quota for Google Workspace is 15 GB. This includes email, email attachments, deleted items, and Drive documents.

How Full is My Mailbox?

  1. Log in to Google Workspace
  2. Select the Waffle icon (Google apps) at the top right.
  3. Select Account.
  4. Select Payments & subscriptions from the menu on the left.
  5. Scroll down and select Account storage.

Message Size

  • The maximum received message size is 50 MB.
  • The maximum sent message size is 50 MB.

If you need to share a file over this size limit use one of the File Storage services available at Cornell. All of these options allow you to share links to files.

Email Receiving Limits

  • Maximum of 60 messages/minute, 3,600 messages/hour, or 86,400 messages/day.
  • Maximum number of 500 attachments on a single message.

Email Sending Limits

After exceeding any of the following limits you will be unable to send email for a period of 24 hours. You will still be able to access your Google Workspace Email and will continue to receive new email, but you will not be able to send.

  • A maximum of 2,000 sent messages per day.
  • A maximum of 10,000 auto-forwarded messages per day (this is different from the maximum sent messages per day limit).
  • The maximum number of recipients (To, Cc and Bcc fields) is 10,000 per day.
  • The maximum number of external recipients (To, Cc and Bcc fields) is 3,000 per day.
  • The maximum number of unique recipients (To, Cc and Bcc fields) is 3,000 per day with a maximum of 2,000 unique external recipients per day.
  • Recipients per message (To, Cc and Bcc fields) 2,000 with a maximum of 500 external recipients.
  • The maximum number of recipients when using SMTP or Gmail API is 100.
Message sent from alternate addresses or aliases, delegated access, and the vacation Gmail vacation responder all count toward these limits.

Learn more about how to send mass emails if you need to reach a broad audience.

Attachment Limits

Attachments are limited to a total of 25MB per message. 

The process of attaching a file to an email increases the size of the attachment. If your attachment is almost 25MB, it may not successfully attach. See our Attachments Not Getting Through article for ways to work around this limitation.

Google does not permit sending or receiving executable files (such as files with names that end in ".exe"). This includes executables that have been compressed (zipped) into files such as .zip, .tar, and .tgz. Also refer to the complete list of file types blocked in Gmail. Because all email to Google Workspace accounts has to first pass through Microsoft, refer also to the complete list of file types blocked in Outlook.

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