Inbound Rate Limits

Postscale Receive processes incoming emails for free on every plan — including the Free tier. There are no per-email charges, no metered billing, and no surprise invoices for inbound traffic. To ensure reliability for all customers, we apply generous hourly rate limits based on your plan.

Free on Every Plan

Unlike most email platforms that charge per inbound email or restrict receiving to paid tiers, Postscale includes inbound processing at no extra cost. Every plan gets full 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)

The only difference between plans is the hourly throughput limit — and even the Free tier supports 500 emails per hour.

Limits by Plan

These are rolling hourly windows. The counter resets every hour automatically.

What Happens When You Hit the Limit

When your organization exceeds its hourly limit, Postscale responds with a temporary deferral. The sending mail server is asked to retry later — which is standard SMTP behavior that all properly configured mail servers handle automatically.

This means:

• No emails are lost. The sender's mail server holds the message and retries.
• No bounces are generated. The sender never sees an error.
• Delivery resumes automatically once the hourly window resets.

Most senders retry within minutes, so in practice the delay is brief. This approach protects your account and our infrastructure without dropping legitimate mail.

How This Compares

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

Postscale is the only platform that includes free inbound email processing with webhook delivery, DMARC analysis, and masked aliases on every plan — including Free.

Designed for Real Workloads

The rate limits are designed to be generous enough that most applications never notice them:

• SaaS support inboxes — Even high-volume support teams rarely exceed 500 emails/hour
• 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 on the Free plan
• IoT and alerts — Receive machine-generated emails from monitoring systems and sensors

If your application regularly approaches the limit, upgrading your plan increases throughput immediately — no migration or configuration changes needed.

Data Retention

Inbound emails are stored for 90 days, giving you plenty of time to process, review, and debug. Raw message data (the original email source) is retained for 30 days. Attachments uploaded to storage follow your bucket's lifecycle policy.

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