How not to be labelled as a spammer by Google when using GMail as a mail server?

Question

Traffic to my site surged a few days ago. As a result the amount of emails my site has been sending has surged as well. At times several emails are being sent each minute and on average an email is being sent every couple of minutes.

I setup GMail to send all of the emails and now they think I am spamming or maybe I hit some limit and they require me to fill out a CAPTCHA from time to time. Once I fill out this CAPTCHA my site is able to email again, but after a while Google requires another CAPTCHA to be filled and my site ceases to mail again. What can I do to prevent this? How do I let Google know that this is not spam?

Answer 1

Using Gmail as a free email you can be temp banned from sending messages or required to submit a captcha if you go over your limit. For free users this limit is as such

Google will temporarily disable your account if you send messages to more than 500
recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages. If you use a
POP1 or IMAP2 client (Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, e.g.), you may only send a
message to 100 people at a time. Your account should be re-enabled within 24 hours.

Link to above: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=22839

For Google App users you have the following:

Google Apps account can currently send to 500 external recipients per day. Google
Apps for Business and Education users can send to 2000 external recipients per day.

Link for Above: https://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=166852

In short if you want to work around this, use email hosted for your domain. EX: [email protected]