The 2kth pseudomoments of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) are, following Conrey and Gamburd, the 2kth integral moments of the partial sums of ζ(s) on the critical line. For fixed k>1/2, these moments are known to grow like false(prefixlogNfalse)k2, where N is the length of the partial sum, but the true order of magnitude remains unknown when k⩽1/2. We deduce new Hardy–Littlewood inequalities and apply one of them to improve on an earlier asymptotic estimate when k→∞. In the case k<1/2, we consider pseudomoments of ζαfalse(sfalse) for α>1 and the question of whether the lower bound false(prefixlogNfalse)k2α2 known from earlier work yields the true growth rate. Using ideas from recent work of Harper, Nikeghbali and Radziwiłł and some probabilistic estimates of Harper, we obtain the somewhat unexpected result that these pseudomements are bounded below by logN to a power larger than k2α2 when k<1/e and N is sufficiently large.