Microsoft Cancels Plans To Rate Limit Exchange Online Bulk Emails (bleepingcomputer.com)
- Reference: 0180534917
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/07/1659220/microsoft-cancels-plans-to-rate-limit-exchange-online-bulk-emails
- Source link: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-plans-to-rate-limit-exchange-online-bulk-emails/
> The change was announced in April 2024, when Microsoft said that it would add new External Recipient Rate (ERR) limits starting January 2025 to fight spam, with plans to begin enforcing the limit on cloud-hosted mailboxes of existing tenants between July and December 2025.
>
> As explained last year, this new Mailbox External Recipient Rate Limit was designed to prevent Microsoft 365 customers from abusing Exchange Online resources and to restrict unfair usage. However, on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that the Exchange Online bulk emailing rate limit is being canceled indefinitely, following negative customer feedback.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-plans-to-rate-limit-exchange-online-bulk-emails/
Here we go again... (Score:2)
Expect a boatload of spam from Exchange Online tenants. Followed by the imposition of rate limits.
This has been a cyclical phenomenon for several years, maybe a decade by now. Spammers abuse the system, Microsoft cracks down, Microsoft does a reorg, someone with no historical context reverses the throttling, the spammers come back, and the cycle repeats...
I wonder how many of the "complaining customers" were in fact astroturfing spammers.
This is just a lowering of the limit (Score:2)
They already have limits - this was just attempting to lower them even further. [1]https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com] They have been telling corps for over two years to
> Exchange Online customers who need to send legitimate bulk commercial email (for example, customer newsletters) should use third-party providers that specialize in these services.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/exchange-online-service-description/exchange-online-limits#receiving-and-sending-limits
translation? (Score:2)
Can someone translate that headline into English?
Re: (Score:1)
Microsoft is lowering limit on the number of external emails (outside of your domain) you can send from your Microsoft domain. If you truly need to bulk-send email, then use a 3rd party sender like Constant Contact or SendGrid.
Dan
How long does email have left at this point? (Score:2)
I had a recent convo with one of our sysadmins at work recently, one of his main job duties is maintaining the servers in place for email and he had asked in a rhetorical way how long email has been around (since the 70s) and given the massive increase in spam/phishing that the Internet has seen especially in the last 1-2 years, how realistic it is to expect email to continue on as a service 15 or 20 years down the road.
It hadn't occurred to me before then that this was a possibility, but I see his point --
Re: (Score:2)
> What we could have done is have brutally stringent anti-spam laws and a federal task force which actively enforced the laws
I guess you mean "brutally stringent US anti-spam laws" and "US federal task force". Which might have helped a little, locally in the US. But would have made no difference to the rest of the world. Most of the spam I receive here in Denmark is sent from somewhere else, and claims sender addresses from yet another place.
Re: (Score:2)
> how realistic it is to expect email to continue on as a service 15 or 20 years down the road.
I'd assume greater than 50%. The reason E-mail outlived all of its contemporaries of gopher, ftp (mostly), and nntp (mostly), is because the alternatives are worse.
What would replace e-mail? Slack/Google Chat/MS Teams? It hasn't yet, even amongst people in the same domain that have those tools as options. This applies to all the consumer chat apps like BBM and Whatsapp; the former has been gone for decades and proves *why* - when vendors decide to nuke a chat service, the data goes away with it. Email still
Re: (Score:2)
Most companies with less that 100k employees have outsourced their email. Even those above that head count have strong incentive to outsource. Email is actually kind of difficult to do right at scale. The people that know how have their own little community. Much of the software that used to be used to implement email at massive scale is no longer publicly available, or was always private (Yahoo & Gmail). MS Exchange used to have trouble breaking 1M inboxes, requiring hundreds of hosts. Sun's Comm
Who? (Score:1)
> .... following negative customer feedback.
So .... spammers are your most important "customers"? Got it.
Re: (Score:2)
Or companies with Sales and Marketing teams or a B2C model. Don't want to push those people even harder off of Dynamics into the arms of Salesforce.
...and I repeat myself (Score:1)
Those are spammers. The problem with CAN-SPAM is it basically legalized spam in the USA within broad parameters and now that companies have come to rely on it there is not a chance in hell the law will ever be strengthened. This changed e-mail from a person-to-person method of communication (remember when you would e-mail your friends versus texting?) to a repository of sludge. I'm extremely diligent about not using my actual e-mail for company crap, so if someone e-mails me I will see it, but there's a goo
Re:Who? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Or companies with Sales and Marketing teams or a B2C model. Don't want to push those people even harder off of Dynamics into the arms of Salesforce.
If those teams are doing that through MS Exchange Online / Office365 / Microsoft365 / Whatever they're calling it this week...they either didn't consult IT and deserve to be kicked off, or their IT is incompetent and they deserve to get kicked off.
Constant Contact is $430/month for a recipient list of 40,000 entries. Vertical Response costs $300/month for a client list of 40,000 recipients. SMTP2Go costs $280/month to send 500,000 emails. Mailgun, Mailjet, and Sendgrid also offer this service. AWS has SES. On-Prem stalwarts with static IP service can spin up a Proxmox Mail Gateway for free if they don't want to just apt-get install postfix.
If the sales drones are sending promo mailers through Exchange Online, instead of using purpose-built services, because they'd rather do that than let IT set up any of these options...let MS tell them to get bent. If those guys *are* going through IT, and that's how IT said to send it...it's time for IT to learn the right way to send promo mailers.
Why not at least attempt to solve the problem? (Score:1)
Wow. An AC that actually had a valid point? Will miracles never cease? But why was AC too afraid to put a handle on it? Maybe it's also a legitimate use of anonymity? Could it be that FP is from a Microsoft insider who has had access to the actual numbers of who profits from spam?
However I think it's not likely that the scamming spammers voluntarily share much loot with their accomplices in high places. Microsoft's profits would be derivative from "volume" that helps sell more ads. I sure would like to comp