Quotas and retention — what is counted, and where

Two distinct limits, often confused: how many messages you may receive in a month, and how long they are kept.

The per-plan figures are on the Pricing page, which takes them from the same source as the application. They are not copied here — a value written in two places eventually diverges, and the stale one is always the one being read.

Volume is counted per organization

Not per inbox, not per workspace. The organization is the billing unit: it carries the plan, the seats and the included volume.

That is what makes espaces-de-travail irrelevant to the counter — they partition access, they meter nothing. Spreading traffic across several workspaces therefore moves no ceiling.

Going over is refused at the SMTP door

When the monthly volume is reached, the message is refused at the door, with a 5.7.x code. It is neither stored nor parsed, and the counter does not move.

Three practical consequences:

1. Your application knows. The refusal is a real SMTP failure, visible in its logs, not a message that vanishes silently.
2. The API says so too. An affected message carries status: "quota_exceeded" and an error object, without the derived keys — see lire-un-message.
3. Nothing is billed for what was refused.

Per-inbox quotas

Beyond the plan ceiling, you can set a per-inbox quota and an alert threshold. That is what stops a runaway test suite from consuming the whole month before anyone notices.

This is available on every plan, including the free one: at several competitors it is reserved for a quote-only tier, and it is exactly the sort of thing that should not have to be asked for.

Retention

Each message is deleted after the number of days attached to your plan. The sweep removes the row and the raw file; it waits for no action on your part and cannot be switched off.

This is not a technical constraint dressed up as a feature: keeping test messages indefinitely — they contain reset links, codes, sometimes real addresses — would be a risk for you and a promise we could not keep in the sub-processor register. See donnees-et-souverainete.

Buying volume without changing plan

The subscription sells features, seats and retention. Volume is bought separately, as prepaid packs, and increasing capacity never changes your subscription. See facturation.

Known limits

• No usage history. The application shows the current month’s volume, no curve. A trend drawn from a single measurement is decoration that lies.
• Packs and payment are not wired up yet — see facturation.