Query severity of forthcoming O365 Auto-forwarding policy change

Hi ExMSW4319 

If the outbound policy is set to Automatic - System Controlled then yes, in September if not action is taken then Auto Forwarding to external domains will be automatically blocked. To ensure existing auto-forwards continue to work, the setting will need to be changed to "On" - for the default policy this will apply to everyone, for a custom outbound policy this will only apply to the users assigned to the policy.

Agree this may cause impact of organisations if they haven't been reading the message centre announcements, but the resolution is a pretty quick change in the portal. 

On the flipside, when we ran through this with a number of our clients they were unaware of some of the auto-forwarding that was occurring and was unable to find a business reason for the forwards, so from their perspective it was a beneficial change that improved security.