Updated Requirements for SMTP Relay through Exchange Online

Carolyn_Liu 

To be frank, yes you are completely missing the point.

Regardless of the tools you are making a Major change in peoples tenants, any change control practices will state that the dates of when a change is implement should be communicated to the affected customer, in this case anyone using M365 with a SMTP relay.  Customers should be notified of the date this change is made in their tenant, regardless of any tools or instructions given - it's change control standard practice.

Also, if your stance is that we give you instructions and tools so don't need to tell you, a few points:

• The instructions have changed over the course of this blog as they weren't detailed enough to begin with, thus relying on people to query what they being/not being told and also to revisit this thread for any update, changes.  If you're saying people should be using this information to mitigate any impact then provide the complete picture and information on day 1, don't drip feed it.
• The report that identifies what email will be impacted was only made available 5 weeks before the start of this change, that is an incredibly short time to identify, investigate and remediate impact for people who could be sending millions of emails a month via relay.  Previous to this I'd done an investigation based on reviewing sending logs and thought we were not impacted only to find by the report that we were, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack without the report and I, and probably others, wasted a lot of time, that having the report made available in timely fashion, would have saved.
• I find the statement "So if I am an admin, I would run the report and check the result, if it impacts me, I will make the change, then I run a report again to ensure my change did apply and the problem is fixed. Then I don;t care when Microsoft will make the change and I don't want to wait till Microsoft pull the plug to validate the result, because it would be too late." incredibly naïve and also dis-respectful, it insinuates that this is a trivial task and that we have plenty of free time to just pickup the work, so if we haven't identified and mitigated all issues in the 5 weeks before the change, when the required report was made available, we haven't done our jobs and any impact is entilely our fault.
• This stance is also contradicted by last years Basic Authentication change where Microsoft did notify people when the change was applied to their tenant.

To reiterate my opinion, this is a Major change with potentially high impact, you should be informing customers when this change is implemented in their tenants, that it could happening between now and the end of Q1 2024 isn't following change control practices.

I'm not expecting this to change for this piece of work but it does need to be feedback that this should be a requirement for future changes.