We are Enbecom.

We have a generous send limit of 200 emails per hour on our regular hosting plans. This means that a hosting account can make up to 200 email sending attempts per hour. A send limit is in place to help protect the performance and reputation of your account and of our infrastructure, which includes limiting the potential impact of a compromised (hacked) hosting account.

Bear in mind that this doesn't always mean that you can send up to 200 emails per hour.  If one of our servers encounters a temporary error at the receiving end when trying to send an email, it may make further attempts within the same hour, in order to help get the message delivered in a reasonable period of time.  To help protect our infrastructure, these attempts count towards the limit.

We also monitor the proportion of emails sent from your hosting account which fail or get deferred at the receiving end, with action taken when a significant amount of these is detected. This is a good indicator of an account being used to send unsolicited email and is, in many cases, due to a website being insecure (e.g. a contact form facility which can be abused to send an email to anyone) or a website or email account being compromised.

Which types of email count towards the limits?

Here are some key examples:

• Messages sent from email accounts within your hosting plan. This includes normal day-to-day email messages to addresses outside your domain, plus emails sent by autoresponders and forwarders.
• Messages sent from your website, either through your hosting plan's email accounts or directly using the server's email facilities. This might include purchase confirmations, order updates, password resets, forum post notifications and more. It might also include administrative emails, security alerts etc if these are sent to email accounts which are outside of your hosting plan.
• Messages sent from services outside your hosting plan via email accounts which are on your hosting plan. This includes emails sent from websites hosted elsewhere through email accounts hosted here.

Which types of email don't count towards the limits?

Here are some key examples:

• Messages sent internally between email accounts on the domain, as long as they are sent using our email facilities and the recipient doesn't have their emails auto-forwarded to an external account.
• Messages sent by websites on your hosting plan using other email providers. This includes where your website sends its emails via SMTP to external email servers.

What happens if the number of emails or proportion of failed and deferred emails exceeds the limits?

Any emails sent over the send limit or when a significant proportion of failed and/or deferred messages has been detected will be silently rejected. Our system does not send a 'bounce' notification back to you for emails which are rejected for this reason because that in itself could be resource intensive, so it is important to monitor your usage.

If your account is being used for spamming, either due to it being compromised or because a user on the account is using it for unsolicited bulk email, the entire hosting account could be suspended without notice - including the website and all email accounts.

If the breach is extreme and/or repeated, your account could be closed.

I need to send more emails than the limit. How can I achieve this?

Here are some options:

• Some website software has facilities to 'throttle' the rate at which it sends emails. You could, for example, ensure that your website sends no more than 150 emails an hour, leaving scope for at least 50 emails per hour through normal day-to-day emailing
• For marketing emails, use a bulk email platform such as Enbecom's Email Campaign Management Platform, MailChimp or Campaign Monitor. These platforms use email servers which are tailored for bulk email, although with all these services, recipients of emails need to have explicitly opted in to any mailing lists.
• For transactional emails from a website, use a bulk transactional email sending service such as Sendinblue.

References to non-Enbecom services are provided for information only. No recommendations are given as to the suitability or reliability of these services.

Should I check my website?

Yes.  It's strongly advised that you make sure your website isn't sending out external emails when it doesn't need to.  One regular example we see is websites' contact forms which, as well as emailing the site owner, they email the email address entered in the form with a 'thanks for contacting us' message.  Another is not putting any protections like reCAPTCHA and another is making account registration too easy, with spam user accounts being created on websites as a result.