Update Aug 13, 2026: To further strengthen protection against abuse and ensure fair use of Exchange Online resources, we are updating how the Tenant External Recipient Rate Limit (TERRL) quota is cal...
Updated Aug 25, 2026
Version 30.0
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The way this limit is calculated is, in itself, unreasonable.
For a total of 10,000 licensed users, the number of external recipients per day is 324,979—an average of just 32 recipients per user.
This means that if each user sends only 10 emails per day to external 4 recipients, the limit is already reached.
In my own case, with 2,500 users in our organization, the average would be around 50 external recipients per user per day. If someone from the Microsoft team is reviewing this comment, I would appreciate an explanation of how commercial teams are expected to operate under such constraints.
Regarding the other comments here, I can confirm that Microsoft’s reports are inaccurate or cannot be reconciled with the data extracted from message trace. Even without these discrepancies, this limitation would not be workable for any company with more than 1,000 users.