Sending a large number of messages

  1. Limits on sending emails
  2. Yandex requirements for honest mailing lists

Specify if Yandex is hosting your or your recipients' mailboxes

If you want to send out mass emails to your partners or clients, please use our special mailing services.

If your mailbox sends out a large number of messages every day, this will be regarded as spam by our security system. To avoid this, Yandex Mail restricts the number of messages you can send per day. These restrictions cannot be changed or avoided.

If this occurred, sending emails from your mailbox will be blocked. Only sending emails is blocked. You will be able to log in to Yandex Mail and receive emails. If you don't try to send email during this time, the block is automatically lifted after 24 hours, otherwise the block is extended for another 24 hours.

If you want your newsletter to reach your Yandex recipients without landing in Spam, please follow Yandex requirements for honest mailing lists. Unsolicited mail should be differentiated from honest mail. Yandex Mail reserves the right to treat messages from mailing lists that don't comply with the mandatory requirements of this document as Spam or reject them. Note also that meeting the optional requirements will significantly reduce the risk of your messages being marked as Spam.

If you send mailing lists to Yandex mailboxes and the messages are rejected by the Yandex mail server, you will receive an automatic report from Mailer-Daemon with the reasons for non-delivery and the name of the server that rejected passing the message to its destination.

Limits on sending emails

You can send up to 500 emails from one mailbox over a 24-hour period. If the email has several recipients, then each individual email sent counts separately towards your total.

Additional limitations are set on the number of recipients:

Number of recipients Restriction
Total for all email in a 24-hour period 500
In one email sent from the site 50
In one email sent from a mail client or over SMTP 35
Number of recipients Restriction
Total for all email in a 24-hour period 500
In one email sent from the site 50
In one email sent from a mail client or over SMTP 35
Attention. Limits can be lowered if Anti-Spam notices the mass emailing of similar messages, templates, spam, advertising, or commercial offers.

Yandex requirements for honest mailing lists

The present document describes what “Yandex” considers to be an honest mailing list. This is not a public offer and does not imply any obligations for Yandex or its email service to services that perform mass distribution of emails.

The document reflects the industry-specific best practices of major ISPs and email services and complies with ASTA regulations and recommendations as well as with “Internet Usage Rules”. The algorithm for distinguishing between mailing lists and spam is proprietary information belonging to Yandex and is not meant for publication or discussion.

Requirements for honest mailing lists:

  1. Subscribing:
    • (Required) A recipient can be added to a mailing list only with their explicit consent, or at their request.
    • (Required) The recipient must explicitly confirm their email address.
    • Recipients' addresses must be validated before being added to the mailing list.
  2. Unsubscribing:
    • (Required) Each message must contain clear instructions on how to unsubscribe from the mailing list. Users must be able to unsubscribe without performing any complicated steps such as password recovery, registration, or authorization. It must not take more than 10 minutes for a recipient to unsubscribe.
    • The message body must explicitly display the recipient's address.
    • (Required) The message must have the list-unsubscribe header formatted according to the RFC standard. Once the user follows the link in this header, they must be unsubscribed from the mailing list immediately.
    • (Required) All links for unsubscribing from the mailing list that are shown in the message must be valid.
  3. Message header:
    • The message subject must be clear to a user and must not be confusing or misleading.
    • The subject must be the same in all messages within the mailing list.
    • (Required) The From field must display the actual email address associated with the mailing list sender. If messages coming to this email address are handled by a bot, the reply messages must contain clear and precise instructions on how to contact your technical support.
  4. Proper network identification:
    • (Required) The software that handles mailing lists must analyze the replies. If the target email server replies that a user doesn't exist, the user must be removed from the mailing list.
    • (Required) The host that handles mailing lists must be assigned a permanent IP address with a properly configured reverse DNS lookup. The registration data of the domain owner must be valid and publicly available through the WHOIS protocol.
    • For proper identification, the domain name must be informative rather than automatically generated similar to x.y.z.w-in-addr-arpa or dsl-4-3-2-1.provider.net.
    • The host utilizing the mailing list must not be used for sending ordinary messages.
    • (If the previous requirement cannot be met.) The domain name specified in the From field must not be used for regular messages and must clearly identify the originator of the email. For instance, notifications about new posts in a forum hosted on the domain example.ru should be sent from the subdomain forum.example.ru, while the newsletter should come from news.example.ru, and so on.
    • (Required) The sender from the From field must fully match the address of the user whose data is used for authentication on the server.
    • (Required) All messages must be signed using DKIM. Also, the SPF record indicating which trusted servers can send mail from the domain must be configured for this domain.
    • It's recommended to configure DMARC for the domain. This is an additional measure that helps make sure that DKIM and SPF belong to the sender and logs attempts to fake the sender.
  5. Other requirements:
    • Changing information about the sender or a landing page for any links in the messages is prohibited.
    • It is not recommended to use short URLs.
    • All links in the message text must be provided in full domain name format rather than in the form of IP addresses or URL encoded domain names.
    • (Required) A message must contain standard headers used for bulk or automated direct mail, such as Precedence: bulk (junk,list, list-unsubscribe, and so on). All links in a message must provide an opportunity to unsubscribe automatically.
    • The headers and general format of a message must comply with the requirements of RFC 5322 and the MIME standard. A message must also contain valid headers Date and Message-ID.
    • The actual encoding must be specified in each part of a message. Messages containing texts in two different encodings are not allowed.
    • Messages formatted in HTML must not contain any JavaScript, ActiveX, or other potentially malicious objects.
Attention. Yandex Mail reserves the right to treat messages from mailing lists that don't comply with the mandatory requirements of this document as Spam or reject them. Note also that meeting the optional requirements will significantly reduce the risk of your messages being marked as Spam.