One of my businesses is currently using Google Apps for Email. Well, we send order confirmation Emails, and shipment notification emails to our customers.

Well, lately about 1/2 way through the day, we are hitting a limit for sending. We send VIA an SMTP connection. So, what we end up having to do is send the remaining emails using another service which is much more prone to loosing mail, or being marked as spam.

Is there a way to get around this? I checked, and it does not even seem that the premium accounts can get through this problem. It does not seem that this could be acceptable for even medium size business use with these caps in place.

A couple of quantification figures (or real/ explicitly stated somewhere) and/or empirically-derived/ observed daily limits wouldn't hurt to stoke the discussion (read: advice-to-come).

Google/Gmail-the-email-server must have specific thresholds in place or else they'd open themselves wide to spammers. However I can not conceive of a scenario where legitimate mail, if in large daily numbers, could not be permitted ONCE the backend becomes aware/cognizant of the condition.

I can only tell the number of threads from a quick count, but it seems to be about 240 threads. However, shipping Emails, it groups in threads of 61 emails, so I would guess at the point of failure we have sent between 500 and 700 emails. I have read that there is a 500 Email limit.

Could you please translate this into English? E.g. what do you mean by "shipping Emails."

Threads are ambiguous. Gmail has "conversations" with uniform common denominator of the same subject line (subsequent leading "Re:," "Fwd:" and some other common "prefixes" terminated by colon-space do not change subject, but trailing space does).

The alleged 61- emails-grouped-in-"threads" doesn't ring a bell. How was that figure arrived at, by inspection of raw traffic mail logs?

If you're sending out great number of mails, how do you execute it in practice... not manually I gather? Could Gmail be stopping the process on account of spammer-like behavior rather than by you overstepping some numeric limit?

Premium accounts shouldn't have any arbitrary limits anyway.

Sorry...

"Shipping Emails" was in reference to my first post "shipment notification emails "

Threads = Conversations

I have no clue why they are grouped in to 61, that seems weird to me too, but when they are grouped, there are usually 61 emails in a conversation.

The two main times that we send an Email to a customer is when they place an order (order confirmation email) and when we actually ship their product (shipment notification email). These are both sent via our server using an SMTP connection, and are sent as actions happen, so are spread fairly evenly throughout the day.

As for Gmail stopping spam like behavior, I think that is exactly the case, but I'm guessing the amount of email sent is the major flag they use to decide.

We ran into the same problems trying to use Google for a site which sends alert type of emails. We had to solve a Captcha every now and then even though the sending volume was really low. I will ask my friend about the current status, we also asked a question in a Google help group.

Can I get a link to that thread?

I was looking for it before posting the comment but didn't find it immediately, so I will have to wait until my friend comes back...

Philipp,
   Can you tell me how to do the captcha solving for the short term fix?