What limits has your organization configured for outbound email, especially external recipients per hour, internal recipients per hour, and total recipients per day? A commonly suggested baseline is 500 external recipients per hour, 1,000 internal recipients per hour, and 1,000 recipients per day, but I'd like to compare that with practical limits other organizations use.
3 Answers
We use fairly conservative settings: about 500 external recipients per hour, a lower threshold for internal recipients, and roughly 1,000 total recipients per user per day. Any higher limit is handled as an exception based on the user’s role and business requirements.
Our limits vary across more than 200 tenants, but they’re generally much lower than those figures. Around 250 recipients per day is fairly common. We can approve exceptions, but only when there’s written justification from an authorized person.
The right numbers depend on the organization and its workflows. At my workplace, it would be unusual for a normal user to send 1,000 messages in an hour or reach 1,000 recipients. We use smaller limits, particularly for internal mail, unless there’s a documented business reason for higher volumes. Distribution lists can also make the recipient counts less obvious, so it’s worth accounting for those separately.
That makes sense. I lowered our limits too, then found one user sending more than 450 messages every day through a shared mailbox. I should have been monitoring that account sooner.