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title: Our email rate limit was working perfectly. It sent one...
description: A founder recounts a support incident where a Pro subscriber received 76 emails in 11 hours despite rate limits capping alerts at 12/hour, a 10-minute...
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# Our email rate limit was working perfectly. It sent one user 76 emails in 11 hours.

**[AlphaAI](https://daily.dev/sources/alphai)** · [@mikhailmakeev](https://daily.dev/mikhailmakeev) · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A founder recounts a support incident where a Pro subscriber received 76 emails in 11 hours despite rate limits capping alerts at 12/hour, a 10-minute per-ticker cooldown, and 24-hour dedup on repeated stories, all of which fired correctly but still added up to 288 possible emails a day. Raising the relevance floor for new alerts only cut volume by 18%, not enough to fix the flood, since a single NVDA earnings day alone generated 221 articles. The real fix shipped was a one-tap way to disable all alerts at once, replacing a 23-tap process, after session replay showed the user angrily tapping through each alert individually at midnight before requesting a refund.

## Content

A guy paid for Pro on Thursday, turned alerts on for 23 tickers, and asked for his money back on Saturday. First refund we've ever paid. He hadn't failed to use the product, he used it exactly as sold and it buried him.

The guards were a cap of 12 emails an hour, a 10 minute cooldown per ticker, and a 24 hour dedup on repeated stories. All of them fired correctly. 12 an hour is 288 a day, and I'd never once written that number down. Those limits were tuned for our sending reputation, which is a mailbox provider's problem, not his.

The obvious fix was to raise the relevance floor for new alerts, and I had it half written before I measured it. On his own tickers that day: at the floor he had, 208 articles and 136 emails after the cap. At the higher floor, 126 articles and 111 emails. That's 18% off a flood, not a fix. One NVDA earnings day produced 221 articles by itself and 103 of them cleared the higher bar.

We shipped it anyway, along with the thing that actually mattered: turning every alert off in one call. Before that it was 23 taps, and the session replay has him doing exactly that at 00:40 on his phone, one card at a time, with a rageclick in the middle.

What still bugs me is that he looked like our best customer to every metric we had. He read a lot before signing up and turned on every feature we ship. Nothing in the funnel flagged him, the refund email was the first signal.

Curious how other people cap this. A daily limit is the obvious next lever and we didn't take it, because silently withholding alerts someone paid for felt worse than sending too many.

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