Released: March 2024 Exchange Server Security Updates

Nino_Bilic 

"The throttling / blocking system (I am assuming you speak of this) is about calling out and nudging the servers that are persistently vulnerable (in other words - significantly out of date)."

Note that Google is almost certainly already doing this for gmail, just no saying anything about it - and also likely not going to 100% blocking the way Microsoft is.  But, now that Microsoft has taken on the risk of the ire of the Internet community. Google almost certainly will publicly sync their policy in line with Microsoft - and that will put an end to these older systems being on the Internet.

Or, so Microsoft thinks. lol.

A number of years ago I had a customer who was still using the Exchange server on an SBS 2011 server (and they are still using it to this day)

I installed Virtualbox, built a FreeBSD system in a virtual image, and now email is routed from the Internet to the FreeBSD system running on the SBS system.  The FreeBSD server also is a forwarder for outgoing mail from the SBS server.  The SBS server is thus not exposed to the Internet only it's FreeBSD guest OS is exposed to the Internet.

This was done to permit an antique server to continue to do useful work without getting destroyed by crackers, it was not done to duck Microsoft's throttling - but it does split my gut laughing about it that it works for that also.