Inbound Rate Limits

Postscale Receive is included with Postscale plans instead of billed as a separate inbound add-on. Published plan limits, account review status, and abuse-prevention controls still apply. To protect all customers, Postscale can temporarily defer inbound messages when an account exceeds its current limits.

Included on Every Plan

Unlike platforms that require a separate inbound product, Postscale includes inbound processing in the core plan. Accounts get access to:

• Email parsing and JSON webhook delivery
• Attachment handling and storage
• Forwarding rules and catch-all addresses
• DMARC report collection
• Masked email aliases (Shield)

Throughput, retention, and abuse-prevention limits vary by plan and account status. Check the pricing page or dashboard for the current limit attached to your account.

Limit Model

Limits are operational controls, not a separate metered billing line item.

What Happens When You Hit the Limit

When your organization exceeds its current inbound limit, Postscale responds with a temporary SMTP deferral. The sending mail server is asked to retry later, which is standard SMTP behavior.

This means:

• Standards-compliant senders retry. The sender's mail server usually holds the message and tries again.
• Postscale does not issue an immediate permanent rejection for ordinary rate-limit deferrals.
• Delivery resumes automatically once the account is back under its limit.

Most senders retry within minutes, though retry behavior is ultimately controlled by the sender's mail server. This approach protects your account and Postscale infrastructure without accepting more traffic than the account can process.

How This Compares

Most email platforms either charge for inbound or don't support it at all. Here's how Postscale stacks up:

Postscale bundles inbound processing, webhook delivery, DMARC reporting, and masked aliases into one product surface instead of requiring separate vendors for each workflow.

Designed for Real Workloads

The limits are designed for normal product workloads:

• SaaS support inboxes — Most teams fit comfortably within the published plan limits
• Notification processing — Parse bounce notifications, auto-replies, and out-of-office messages without worrying about costs
• Email-based workflows — Build ticket systems, CRM integrations, or approval workflows without a separate inbound provider
• IoT and alerts — Receive machine-generated emails from monitoring systems and sensors

If your application regularly approaches the limit, upgrading your plan or arranging custom throughput increases capacity without changing your MX integration.

Data Retention

Inbound emails are stored for 90 days, giving you time to process, review, and debug. Postscale stores parsed headers, bodies, and attachment metadata; the original raw MIME source is not retained by default. Attachments are stored separately in Postscale-managed object storage and are cleaned up with inbound email retention unless a shorter lifecycle policy applies. Where application-side attachment encryption is enabled, attachment objects are encrypted before object storage upload and decrypted only through authenticated Postscale download endpoints.

After the retention period, data is automatically cleaned up to keep your account tidy and your database performant.