How many emails can a free Gmail account send from Apps Script?
Google’s quota page lists 100 email recipients per day for consumer accounts and 1,500 for Google Workspace, with quotas resetting 24 hours after the first request. If each enquiry sends a customer reply and an owner alert, plan on roughly 50 enquiries a day on free Gmail.
The numbers
| Account | Email recipients per day (Apps Script) |
|---|---|
| Free Gmail (consumer) | 100 |
| Google Workspace | 1,500 |
Quotas reset 24 hours after the first request, and Google says they are “subject to … change at any time without notice”. Source: Apps Script quotas (fetched 9 October 2026; page last updated 3 September 2026). Form-submit triggers also have a daily runtime limit (90 minutes on consumer accounts), but each run takes seconds.
What it means in practice
An instant-reply set-up usually sends two emails per enquiry: the reply to the customer and an alert to you. On free Gmail that is about 50 enquiries a day. Turn the owner alert email off (and rely on the sheet and Gmail notifications) and it is about 100. A small cleaning or trades business is very unlikely to reach that.
How to make sure it never fails silently
- Check
MailApp.getRemainingDailyQuota()before sending, as Google’s quota page recommends. - If the quota is used up, write a clear status in the sheet, such as “daily email quota used up (call them)”, instead of letting the script crash.
- If only one email is left, send the customer reply first and skip the owner alert, noting that in the status.
In our Reply-in-5 demo tests, the first draft sent nothing to the customer when only one email was left. The fixed version gives the customer reply priority, and both quota scenarios now pass.