# Sudden increase in emails
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/sudden-increase-in-emails/279777
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [September 22, 2023, 10:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/sudden-increase-in-emails/279777 "2023-09-22T10:04:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Alexander\_Wright](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Alexander_Wright)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2023, 10:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/sudden-increase-in-emails/279777/1 "2023-09-22T10:04:10Z")
I’ve noticed a large increase in my forum’s email traffic:
In addition to this increase, there are no logs in April.
We did have a peak of posts in August, but this equalled April…
We’ve hit a cap in our email relay service, and would like to reduce the number of outgoing emails.
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### Author:  [@packman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/packman)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2023, 10:19am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/sudden-increase-in-emails/279777/2 "2023-09-22T10:19:35Z")
I think you need to know what’s causing the extra emails first. You could use the ‘Email Statistics’ query in the [Data Explorer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/32566?silent=true) plugin to get a good idea of what’s causing the increase in numbers.
The query only gives you a previous period from the current date. You could either modify it to accept a date range or run it a few times for increasing periods and put the data into a spreadsheet to calculate the monthly stats.
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### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2023, 10:57am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/sudden-increase-in-emails/279777/3 "2023-09-22T10:57:04Z")
I think, by default, email logs are only kept for 90 days so this will restrict how far back in the history you can reach.
Having a glance down your `/admin/email/sent` page may shed some more light on exactly what kind of emails may be generating the excess. I think if you’ve set any categories to be `default watching` that can sneak up on you, or possibly a change in activity summary frequency? You can also use the filters at the top to narrow the list down, particularly the ‘email type’:
