Google Workspace suspended for cold email: why, and a safer daily limit

Google's Workspace Acceptable Use Policy forbids using its services “to generate, distribute, publish or facilitate unsolicited mass email, promotions, advertisements, or other solicitations”, and says a breach “may result in suspension or termination, or both, of the applicable Services”. Its sender guidelines add: “Don't purchase email addresses from other companies” and “Don't send messages to people who didn't sign up to get messages from you.”

Cold email is, by definition, mail to someone who did not sign up for it, so a Workspace mailbox used for it always carries this risk. The policy's words are “unsolicited mass email”: the more a mailbox's sending looks like mass mail (high volume, bought or scraped lists, the same message to everyone, spam reports), the closer it is to what the policy names.

Both stop mail going out, so they look the same from the mailbox. The Admin console tells them apart, in the status column of Directory → Users.

Google's published limits for a paid Workspace user are 2,000 messages a day and 3,000 external recipients a day; a trial account gets 500. Mail merge is capped at 1,500 a day. “After reaching one of these limits, users can't send new messages for up to 24 hours”, though they can still sign in, receive mail and use their other Google services.

Those are ceilings for ordinary business mail, not a target for cold email. A mailbox sending cold email anywhere near them is the mass mail the policy describes, long before it reaches the number.

A sending-limit restriction lifts on its own within 24 hours, so there is nothing to restore. Sending the same volume again the next day is how it comes back.

An account Google suspended for abuse is another matter, and Google's own pages disagree about it. The account-status page says the user has no access until an administrator restores it. The restore page lists the suspensions an administrator can reverse (one an admin made, an unverified sign-in, an account that might be at risk, an underage user) and says accounts suspended for “abuse by breaching the Google Workspace or Cloud Identity Terms of Service” are “unrecoverable; they can't be restored by a Google administrator or Google Workspace support”.

So try it: in the Admin console, open Directory → Users, filter by User status and tick Suspended, then choose Reactivate from the user's More options. If Google refuses, plan as though the mailbox is gone.

Nothing makes cold email from a mailbox safe; Google decides for itself what it treats as spam. What keeps a mailbox furthest from the mass mail the policy forbids is how it is used:

Galactic sends at most 50 emails a day from a connected Workspace mailbox, whatever its own daily cap says, and only from a work account: personal Gmail cannot be connected. Each email is written per business from your template, and every one carries an unsubscribe link and the one-click unsubscribe headers.

It is not a promise. Bounces and replies arrive in the mailbox, where Galactic cannot see them, so add a bounced address to the do-not-contact list yourself. And a sending service is not an escape from the rules: most of them restrict cold email too, as Email providers sets out provider by provider.