Ask HN: I hit gmail's receive-rate limit, here's what happened.

I noticed when a client had emailed me and I hadn't received it within several hours. It turned out to be affecting all my (paid, business-class) Google Mail inbound mail, with messages being delayed by over 24 hours at its peak. Google support was very helpful and discovered that since I had several servers emailing me every minute of every day, I had hit a rate limit and been throttled. I'm guessing the limit must be 5000+ emails per day, but the up-shot was my regular email service is taking quite a while to return to normal. Delays appear to be random - some messages arrive instantly, some generate the old SMTP "delayed" email back to the sender. I'd love to hear HN's opinion on this (apart from "fix your f<i></i><i></i>* cron jobs!", that one is obvious and has been done!).