Microsoft 365 launches High Volume Email in public preview with no per-minute message limits

Microsoft has introduced a public preview of High Volume Email (HVE) for its Exchange Online service, with the aim of allowing large corporations to send a higher volume of emails. This feature is now available for Microsoft 365 users.

According to a blog post by Microsoft:

HVE is a new service designed primarily for line of business applications and other high-volume SMTP Auth submissions that enables you to send internal messages beyond the current limits of Exchange Online. Customers using on-premises servers in an Exchange hybrid configuration to send a large volume of internal messages can use this service instead and decommission their on-premises servers.

Currently, Exchange Online limits Microsoft 365 users to sending a maximum of 10,000 emails per day and restricts the sending rate to a maximum of 30 messages per minute.

The recently introduced HVE service has significantly expanded the daily recipient limit to 100,000 per tenant, a ten-fold increase from the standard Exchange Online service. Additionally, HVE removes the previous restriction of 30 messages per minute, enabling users to send an unlimited number of messages per minute.

During the public preview of HVE, Microsoft states that each tenant will be able to create a maximum of 20 accounts for sending messages. Additionally, external recipients will be restricted to a daily limit of 2,000. SMTP Basic Authentication will be utilized during the preview period, but it is expected that OAuth authentication will be implemented once HVE becomes generally available.

The blog stated:

The public preview includes an admin experience in the Exchange admin center to manage HVE accounts, a report to track the usage, and a SMTP endpoint using basic SMTP auth to send email.

Currently, this newly launched service is only available in the North American region. However, Microsoft has future plans to extend support for HVE to other regions worldwide. There is no information available yet on the expected date for the service to reach GA status.