Email send limit exceeds for tenant need email alerts before reach the limit

Question

Email send limit exceeds for tenant need email alerts before reach the limit

adminofsense 0

Hi All

i would like to receive email alerts before i reach my tenant send email limit to outbound external recipients but not being able to find out such feature in Exchange online admin center.

Please let me know if i can receive these alerts through emails.

0 comments

3 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Exchange Online doesn't have a built-in option to email you when your tenant is approaching its outbound recipient limit. You can monitor outbound email activity through Exchange Online reporting, but there's no native threshold alert for this.

Your best option would be to use PowerShell with a scheduled Azure Automation runbook to monitor outbound recipient counts and send an alert when usage reaches a certain percentage of your limit, like 80% or 90%. Just keep in mind that reporting data can be delayed, so it won't be real-time. Microsoft Defender can also alert on unusual outbound email activity, but that's different from monitoring your tenant's actual sending limit.

Answer 2

Alina Le 5,585 Independent Advisor

Hello

Unfortunately, Exchange Online does not currently provide a built-in email alert before the Tenant External Recipient Rate Limit (TERRL) is reached. Administrators are only notified after the limit has been exceeded and message delivery is affected.

At the moment, the most practical approach is to regularly review the tenant's usage in Exchange Admin Center > Reports > Mail flow > Tenant Outbound External Recipients, or implement a custom monitoring solution that sends notifications when usage reaches a predefined threshold.

User's image

References:

Troubleshoot outbound sending limits and blocked users in Exchange Online
Community example of a custom alerting approach based on TERRL utilization: https://github.com/KelvinTegelaar/CIPP/issues/4166

(This link is shared by community members for your convenience. It points to a third-party site that is not managed or verified by Microsoft. Please translate it into your language and review carefully before using it. )

Kind regards,

adminofsense 0 Reputation points

2026-10-07T10:29:04+00:00

Not being able to locate the exact script for my requirement in the shared community example

and i am interested to know about if there is no such feature then how it is mentioned on TIP that we can "setup a custom alert policy to receive notifications before your organization reaches sending limits"
Alina Le 5,585 Reputation points Independent Advisor

2026-10-07T16:33:09.97+00:00

Hi,

Thank you for your update.

I will review this issue again based on the information you provided and update you soon.

Answer 3

Yes. Email alerts are available for outbound sending limits.

For the tenant external recipient limit, the built-in alert policy Email sending limit exceeded can notify the TenantAdmins group by email. The alert policies are enabled by default and can be reviewed or modified in the Microsoft Defender portal on the Alert policy page.

A practical setup is:

Open the Microsoft Defender portal.
Go to Alert policy.
Find Email sending limit exceeded.
Review or modify the notification settings so the required admins receive the email alerts.

To monitor how close the tenant is to the Tenant External Recipient Rate Limit (TERRL), use:

Exchange admin center > Reports > Mail flow
Tenant Outbound External Recipients report

That report shows TERRL usage for the organization.

If alerts are needed before the limit is reached, Microsoft recommends creating a custom alert policy, for example at 80% of TERRL, so there is time to redistribute sending or move bulk/high-volume external email to another service.

For bulk or high-volume external email, the recommended alternative is Azure Communication Services email.