How HubSpot's Send Frequency Cap Keeps You on the Right Side of the Spam Act
A frequency cap stops one team flooding an inbox, but it does not make your email program compliant with the Spam Act 2003. Here is what the cap actually does, how to set it, and what still needs to be right underneath it.
Send too many emails to the same person in a short window and you get unsubscribes, complaints, and spam folder placement. That is the plain version of a problem most HubSpot accounts run into once nurture, sales sequences, and service emails are all firing out of the same portal at once.
HubSpot's Send Frequency Cap is the tool built to stop it: a setting that limits how many marketing emails one contact can receive in a day or a week, regardless of how many campaigns, workflows, or team members are trying to reach them.
It is worth setting up properly. But a frequency cap is not the same thing as being compliant with the Spam Act 2003, and treating it as the whole answer is where this gets risky for a growing business.
What actually causes the complaint
The cause is volume. A contact who gets a newsletter, a re-engagement sequence, and a sales follow-up in the same 24 hours has no way of knowing those came from three different teams inside your business. They just see a company that will not stop emailing them, and they unsubscribe, or report it as spam.
Once a contact does that, HubSpot's own deliverability metrics take a hit, and so does your standing with the mailbox providers you rely on to reach everyone else.
Setting up the frequency cap
The setting lives in your HubSpot Email tool settings. From there you can set a daily or weekly ceiling on how many marketing emails a single contact can receive.
To cap it at one email a day, set it to one. If you prefer two a week as your default, with a temporary lift for a product launch or a seasonal campaign, that works too. HubSpot applies the cap across your marketing sends and holds back anything that would put a contact over the limit until the next window opens.
Different sending patterns call for different caps. A weekly newsletter probably wants a light touch, once a week is plenty. A short sale or promotion might justify a daily send, but only for the few days it runs. A major product announcement might need you to lift the cap temporarily so the message actually gets through. Watch your open and unsubscribe rates as you go, they will tell you when the setting is wrong before a complaint does.
Do you know how many emails one contact gets a week?
Nobody owns the total, so every team sends its own campaign.
That is genuinely useful. It stops three unrelated teams from accidentally stacking sends on the same person in the same week, which is the most common way this goes wrong.
Why the cap is not the compliance answer
Most write-ups on this feature skip this part. The Spam Act 2003 does not ask how many emails you sent. It asks whether you had consent to send any of them, and whether the recipient can get out easily.
Under ACMA's guidance, consent comes in two forms. Express consent is where the person knows and accepts that they will get marketing from you. Inferred consent only applies where they gave you their address directly and it is reasonable to think they would expect marketing from you, usually because there is an existing, provable relationship and what you are sending relates directly to it.
Every commercial message also needs a working unsubscribe option that does not require the person to log in, hand over more personal information, or create an account. And if a complaint is ever raised, the burden of proving consent existed sits with you, the sender, not with the person who complained.
A frequency cap reduces how often you test that consent. It does nothing to establish it in the first place. You can have a perfectly calm sending cadence built entirely on a purchased list or an inferred relationship that will not hold up, and the Spam Act does not care that the emails were spaced out nicely.
What to check alongside the cap
Three things worth confirming before you rely on frequency capping as your safety net:
- Every list you are sending to has a genuine consent basis, express or properly inferred, not just "they filled in a form once in 2022."
- Your unsubscribe link works, is visible, and does not ask for anything beyond clicking it.
- Contacts who have gone cold are being re-engaged deliberately, not just left in every active workflow because nobody archived them.
That last one matters more than it sounds. A contact who has not opened anything in a year is exactly the kind of record that generates a complaint the moment they get one email too many. We have written about re-engaging dead contacts in a way that stays Spam Act safe, and about scoring your dead contacts before you send to them again, so you know which ones are worth the risk.
HubSpot's Email Health tool is also worth checking alongside the frequency cap. It is built to catch deliverability problems before they show up as a drop in open rates.
Set the cap, then check what is underneath it
None of this means skip the frequency cap. Set it. It is a genuinely easy way to stop your own teams from accidentally overwhelming the same contact in the same week.
Which team's email would you drop to stay under the cap?
A cap forces a decision somebody has been putting off.
Just do not mistake it for the whole job. The cap controls volume. Consent and an unsubscribe that actually works are what keep you on the right side of ACMA, and those need checking on their own terms.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your list hygiene and your sending setup, that is RevOps work we do inside HubSpot regularly.