To send a group email in Gmail, type a Google Contacts label name into the To field and Gmail fills in everyone on it. Put the label in Bcc instead if recipients shouldn’t see each other. Personal Gmail caps you at 500 recipients per message and 500 messages a day, and Google Workspace raises that to 2,000 recipients per message.

The frame for this one: the megaphone. A megaphone is easy to pick up and hard to aim. The difference between To and Bcc is the whole aiming mechanism.

Get it wrong and you’ve published forty people’s email addresses to each other. Nobody gets a second chance at that one.

Three Ways to Send a Group Email in Gmail

Pick by what you need rather than by what’s fastest. All three are documented by Google.

Method	Best for	Google’s documented limit
A Google Contacts label in To, Cc or Bcc	The same handful of people, repeatedly, from your own account	Counts against the standard 500 or 2,000 recipient caps
A Google Group address	A shared list that others manage, with conversation history	Google caps a Workspace group at 50,000 external recipients a day
Gmail mail merge, formerly multi-send	Personalized bulk mail with an unsubscribe link	Google allows 1,500 recipients per message and 1,500 a day

If you don’t have a list yet, our guide to how to create a Gmail Group covers building one in Google Contacts first. This page assumes the list exists and covers the sending.

How Do You Send a Group Email Without Showing All the Recipients?

Put the group in the Bcc field. Google documents exactly what each recipient can then see, and the rules are more specific than most people assume.

“The recipients won’t know that you added anyone to ‘Bcc.'”

“Anyone you add to the ‘Bcc’ field will see that they were added using ‘Bcc.’ They will also see message recipients in the ‘To’ and ‘Cc’ fields.”

“People you add in ‘Bcc’ can’t see the name or email address of anyone else you add in the ‘Bcc’ field.”

“If people reply all to a message, people in ‘Bcc’ won’t see the reply.”

Source: Google, Send or unsend Gmail messages

Read the second one again, because it surprises people. A Bcc recipient can see everyone in To and Cc. They can also tell they were Bcc’d.

Bcc hides your recipients from each other. It doesn’t hide them from the people in To and Cc, and it doesn’t hide the fact that a Bcc happened.

Google adds one caveat that matters for mixed audiences.

“If your recipients don’t use Gmail, they may not see that they were added to the ‘Bcc’ field.”

Behavior outside Gmail is up to the receiving client.

Our deeper piece on how to use the BCC line covers the etiquette and the RFC behind it.

What Microsoft Doesn’t Document

Google’s Bcc documentation is materially better than Microsoft’s, which is unusual and worth knowing if you work across both.

Microsoft’s Bcc page, ms.date 04/09/2026, says only that other recipients “don’t see whose address is on the Bcc line.” It never states whether a Bcc recipient can see the To and Cc list, and never says what Reply All does.

Neither vendor documents what happens when a Bcc’d person hits Reply All themselves. That’s a genuine gap on both sides, so treat any confident claim about it as guesswork.

How Many People Can You Email at Once in Gmail?

The answer depends entirely on whether you’re on free Gmail or Google Workspace, and the gap is large.

Limit	Free personal Gmail	Google Workspace
Recipients per message	Google states 500	Google states 2,000 total, with 500 external maximum
Messages per day	Google states 500	Google states 2,000, or 500 on trial accounts
Total recipients per day	Google publishes no figure	Google states 10,000
Unique recipients per day	Google publishes no figure	Google states 3,000, with 2,000 external
Recipients per message over SMTP, POP or IMAP	Not published	Google caps this at 100
Lockout after hitting a limit	Google says 1 to 24 hours	Google says up to 24 hours

Workspace limits run over a rolling 24-hour window rather than resetting at midnight. Google also counts sends from aliases, delegated accounts and the vacation responder toward the same totals.

Does a Group Address Count as One Recipient or as Fifty?

Nobody at Google has ever answered this in writing, and it’s the single most important unanswered question about group email.

I checked six Google pages looking for an explicit statement. None exists.

What Google does do is recommend a Google Group as the way around the limit. Its personal Gmail limits page puts it like this.

“To prevent this from happening in the future, try creating a Google Group of all your email recipients and sending the message to that group’s email address.”

That strongly implies a group counts as one recipient. Google never says so.

Google’s own Groups page then pulls the other way, for the group’s outbound quota.

“Total recipients is the total number of recipients, not the total number of unique recipients. For example, if one of the group members is a subgroup that has two members, the subgroup counts as three recipients: the subgroup and its two members.”

That’s expansive counting, on a different meter from the one your Gmail account uses.

Treat any claim that a Google Group “bypasses the 2,000 recipient limit” as undocumented. The behavior may well be real. The documentation isn’t there.

Gmail Mail Merge, Which Used to Be Called Multi-Send

Google renamed multi-send to mail merge, and its own page states it plainly: “Mail merge replaces multi-send mode in Gmail.” The old help URL is dead, so any guide linking to it is stale.

The first thing to check is whether you have it at all. Mail merge is a Google Workspace feature, and free @gmail.com accounts are absent from Google’s eligibility list.

Mail merge detail	What Google documents
Recipients per message	Google allows up to 1,500 in the To line
Recipients per day	Google caps mail merge at 1,500
Unique recipients per month	Google states there is no limit
Unsubscribe link	Google adds a unique one automatically to every email
Cc and Bcc	Google allows one recipient only, and none at all when using a spreadsheet
Attachments	Allowed, but Google includes a copy in every recipient’s message
Blocked features	Google blocks Reply, Forward, Schedule send and Confidential mode

Two of those rows cost people real money. A single Bcc recipient gets a copy of every outgoing email. Google’s own worked example shows 500 recipients plus one Bcc consuming 1,000 of the daily limit.

Attachments behave the same way. Google’s example of 500 recipients and a 10 MB file works out to roughly 5 GB of storage consumed.

One more note. Google’s Gmail Help page frames 1,500 as a combined ceiling inside a 2,000 daily total. The Workspace admin page presents it as a mail-merge-specific sub-limit, and the two aren’t reconcilable as written.

Can You Send a Group Email in Gmail on iPhone?

You can send to individual addresses, and Google publishes no procedure for emailing a Contacts label from a phone.

Every documented method starts “On your computer.” There’s no Google Contacts app for iPhone either, only syncing into Apple’s own Contacts app.

Wait, so it’s impossible on mobile? That’s not what I’m saying, and it’s an important distinction. Google documents the desktop procedure and documents no mobile one, which is an absence of instructions rather than a stated block.

The reliable mobile route is a Google Group address, because that’s a normal email address your phone treats like any other. Set the group up on a computer once, then send from anywhere.

When Does Google Treat You as a Bulk Sender?

At roughly 5,000 messages a day to personal Gmail accounts, and the status is permanent once you trigger it.

Google’s wording is specific.

“A bulk sender is any email sender that sends close to 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts within a 24-hour period.”

Messages sent from the same primary domain all count toward that 5,000.

Google then adds the part people miss. Senders who meet that criteria “at least once are permanently considered bulk senders.” Google adds that bulk sender status “doesn’t have an expiration date.”

Cross that line once and the requirements apply forever.

Bulk sender requirement	Google’s stated rule
Authentication	Google requires both SPF and DKIM, where smaller senders need only one
DMARC	Google requires a record, and says the policy may be set to none
Unsubscribe	Google requires RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail
Spam rate, target	Google says to keep it below 0.10% in Postmaster Tools
Spam rate, hard ceiling	Google says never reach 0.30% or higher
Honoring unsubscribes	Google recommends 48 hours, and treats a miss as a failure condition
DKIM key length	Google requires 1,024 bits or longer, and recommends 2,048

Two details worth flagging. A mailto link or a link in the message body does not satisfy the one-click requirement, which needs the List-Unsubscribe-Post header.

Google’s own pages also contradict each other on the 48-hour rule. Its FAQ calls it a recommendation. That same FAQ then lists a failure to honor unsubscribes within 48 hours as a condition that blocks delivery mitigations.

Once you’re at that volume you’ve outgrown Gmail. One of the email marketing tool options is the right home for that traffic.

What Goes Wrong With Group Emails, and How to Fix It

Some Recipients Never Got It

The usual cause sits in the contact card. Google adds only a contact’s default email address to a label, so a colleague with two addresses contributes only one.

The second cause is a sending limit. If you hit one, Google blocks new sends for 1 to 24 hours on personal Gmail and up to 24 hours on Workspace.

The Whole Thread Turned Into a Reply-All Storm

Microsoft built a feature for this in Exchange Online, and then never documented what it does.

The four settings exist, and Microsoft’s Learn page names them. They are minimum recipients, minimum reply-alls, block duration hours and a status toggle.

Every parameter description in Microsoft’s PowerShell reference is still literal placeholder text reading {{ Fill ... Description }}.

Microsoft has published numbers on its Exchange team blog. The original design blocked a thread after 10 reply-alls to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes, for 4 hours. Those are blog-sourced legacy defaults rather than current documented values.

Gmail has no equivalent feature at all. Bcc remains the only real protection, which is the whole argument for aiming the megaphone properly in the first place.

The List Is Out of Date

Export it and look at it properly. Our guide to how to export Gmail contacts covers pulling the list to CSV, and Google caps an account at 25,000 contacts.

Does Anyone Reply to a Group Email?

Sending to forty people is easy. Knowing whether it landed is the harder problem, and volume tells you nothing about it.

EmailAnalytics is a SaaS tool that visualizes team email activity in Gmail and Outlook, focused on how long replies take. You can Sign up for a free trial today and see which of your group sends generate conversations and which land silently.

Group sending skews the numbers people track. Our pieces on email metrics and average response time both cover why a big outbound day distorts a team’s averages. For everything else Gmail can’t do alone, our roundup of Gmail tools is the place to start.

Start Here: Sending Your First Group Email Safely

1. Build the list as a Contacts label first, and check each contact’s default address, since Google adds only that one.
2. Put the label in Bcc unless recipients need to see each other and reply to each other.
3. Count the recipients. Personal Gmail stops you at 500 per message, and Workspace at 2,000 with 500 external.
4. Send it to yourself first, then check what the To, Cc and Bcc fields show on arrival.
5. If you’re doing this weekly to hundreds of people, move to a Google Group or to mail merge instead.

Frequently Asked Questions About Group Emails in Gmail

How do you send a group email in Gmail?

Create a label in Google Contacts, then type that label name into Gmail’s To, Cc or Bcc field and select it, and Gmail fills in every contact on the list. Use Bcc if the recipients should not see each other’s addresses. A Google Group address works too, and behaves like a single normal email address.

How do you BCC a group in Gmail?

Click Bcc in the compose window, then type your Contacts label name and select it, exactly as you would in the To field. Google documents that Bcc recipients can see everyone in To and Cc, can tell they were added via Bcc, and cannot see other Bcc recipients. Google also states that people in Bcc will not receive replies sent with Reply All.

Can BCC recipients see each other in Gmail?

No. Google states that people you add in Bcc “can’t see the name or email address of anyone else you add in the ‘Bcc’ field.” They can, though, see every recipient in the To and Cc fields, and Google notes that recipients outside Gmail may not even see that they were Bcc’d.

How many people can you email at once in Gmail?

Free personal Gmail allows 500 recipients per message and 500 messages per day, per Google’s published limits. Google Workspace allows 2,000 recipients per message with a maximum of 500 external, 2,000 messages per day and 10,000 total recipients per day. Exceeding a limit blocks sending for 1 to 24 hours on personal Gmail and up to 24 hours on Workspace.

Does a Google Group count as one recipient against Gmail’s limits?

Google has never documented this either way, which surprises people given how often a Google Group is recommended as the workaround. Google’s own personal Gmail limits page suggests creating a Google Group to avoid hitting the 500 recipient cap, which implies single counting without stating it. Treat any claim that a group bypasses the limit as undocumented behavior rather than as published policy.

Is Gmail multi-send still available?

Google renamed multi-send to mail merge, and states on its own help page that “Mail merge replaces multi-send mode in Gmail.” Mail merge is a Google Workspace feature and is not available on free personal Gmail accounts. Google caps it at 1,500 recipients per message and 1,500 per day, and adds an unsubscribe link to every message automatically.

Can you send a group email from the Gmail app on a phone?

Google publishes no procedure for emailing a Google Contacts label from a mobile app, and every documented method begins “On your computer.” There is also no Google Contacts app for iPhone, only syncing into Apple’s Contacts app. The reliable mobile route is a Google Group address, which your phone treats as an ordinary email address.

What We Verified, and When

Every limit and quotation here was checked against Google and Microsoft documentation on 4 August 2026. Google’s consumer help pages print no revision date, so none is implied, and the Workspace admin pages that do print one are dated in the text.

Three things I looked for and could not find. Google never states how a group address is counted against sending limits, Microsoft never filled in its reply-all storm threshold documentation, and neither vendor documents what happens when a Bcc’d recipient hits Reply All.