If your business or organization uses Microsoft"s Exchange Online to handle your mass email messages. The bad news is that the company is going to place limits on the number of emails sent to external sources. The good news is that this new limit will not happen for at least several months, and some won"t have to deal with it for over a year.
In a blog post, Microsoft announced that the External Recipient Rate limit for Exchange Online will be capped at 2,000 recipients every 24 hours. The post explained the reasons for this new external limit:
Exchange Online does not support bulk or high-volume transactional email. We have not enforced limiting of bulk email until now, but we plan on doing so with the introduction of an External Recipient Rate (ERR) limit. The ERR limit is being introduced to help reduce unfair usage and abuse of Exchange Online resources.
Currently, Exchange Online has a Recipient Rate Limit of 10,000 recipients per day. The new system will set the External Recipient Rate as a sub-limit of the Recipient Rate Limit.
The good news is that the new ERR limit won"t be enforced until at least January 1, 2025. When that date arrives, the sub-limit will be placed on new tenants for cloud-based email systems. Sometime between July and December 2025, the EER limit will be enforced on existing tenants.
Businesses and organizations that need higher message amounts for bulk email services that will not be available for Exchange Online are being asked to move to Microsoft"s Azure Communication Services for Email. Depending on the service plan purchased, it can handle millions of emails per month.
Microsoft just announced today that the stand-alone Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 apps will lose their support, along with the other Office 2016 and 2019 apps, on October 14, 2025.