# How the frequency cap protects your contacts

Source: https://help.meisa.io/articles/frequency-cap

The frequency cap limits how many marketing-style emails one person can get from a product in an hour and in a day, so a busy day of sequences, broadcasts and lifecycle emails never floods anyone's inbox. New products start at 2 per hour and 4 per day, and you can change both in **Settings**, **Product details**, **Sending limits**.

## What counts toward the cap

The cap covers marketing-style email:

- Broadcasts.
- Sequence emails.
- Transactional emails (triggers) that respect unsubscribes.

It never limits transactional emails set to **Send even if the person unsubscribed**, such as login codes, password resets and receipts. Those always go out, and they do not use up a slot. Emails sent one to one through the direct send API are not limited either.

Meisa counts emails over a rolling window: the last 60 minutes for the hourly cap and the last 24 hours for the daily cap.

## What happens when someone is at the cap

- **Sequence email**: it waits. Meisa moves the step to the moment the next slot opens, then sends it. Nothing is lost.
- **Broadcast**: that person is skipped for this broadcast. They show in the broadcast report under **Didn't arrive**, **Couldn't be sent**.
- **Transactional email**: it is skipped. Your app gets HTTP 200 with `"status": "skipped"` and `"reason": "frequency_capped"`, so it should not retry.

## Change the cap

Only owners and admins can change it.

1. Click **Settings** in the sidebar.
2. Open **Product details**.
3. Scroll to **Sending limits**.
4. In **At most this many emails per person, per hour**, enter a whole number from 1 to 50.
5. In **At most this many emails per person, per day**, enter a whole number from 1 to 200.
6. Click **Save**.

![Product details settings with the Sending limits section](https://cdn.kamaan.io/kamaan/sites/6ae9f671d5ea373710b2366f/images/meisa-settings-product-733e5ae1.webp)
To turn a limit off, leave its box empty. It then shows **No limit**. Each product has its own cap, so set it for every product you send from.

## Pick a sensible limit

- Most SaaS products do well with the defaults. A new signup can still get a welcome email, an onboarding step and a product email on the same day.
- If you run several sequences at once, a lower daily cap keeps people from getting three emails in an hour when the sequences overlap.
- Raise the hourly cap only if people expect quick follow-ups, for example a short event reminder series.

## Other limits that still apply

The cap is one of several protections. Even with the cap off:

- No person gets more than 10 emails a day from one product. This catches runaway automations.
- The same email does not go to the same person twice within 60 minutes.
- After a temporary bounce, marketing-style email to that person pauses for 24 hours.

See [Why was my email not sent?](/articles/why-was-my-email-not-sent) for every reason Meisa skips an email.

## Troubleshooting

- **A sequence email went out later than its delay.** The person was at the cap, so the step waited for the next free slot. This is expected.
- **A login code was not sent.** The frequency cap never blocks these. Check that the email has **Send even if the person unsubscribed** ticked, then look at the other reasons in [Why was my email not sent?](/articles/why-was-my-email-not-sent)
- **I can't edit the boxes.** You need to be an owner or admin of the product.

## Related articles

- [Why was my email not sent?](/articles/why-was-my-email-not-sent)
- [Create an onboarding email sequence](/articles/create-an-email-sequence)
- [Send transactional emails with triggers](/articles/send-transactional-email)
- [My emails are going to spam: what to check](/articles/emails-going-to-spam)