A surprise announcement brings the news that the Exchange Online High Volume Email (HVE) solution will only deliver messages to internal recipients from June 2025. Azure ECS is now the sole offering for sending large volumes of email to external recipients. On the upside, HVE will support basic authentication until September 2028 to give tenants the chance to upgrade devices and apps.
In our 2024 review of Microsoft 365, we consider some of the major technical advances that occured in Microsoft's cloud ecosystem in 2024 together with some upcoming changes that have the potential to affect tenant operations. As always, our choice of what's important and what's not might not match yours, so feel free to comment and voice your opinion.
If you're looking for an email service capable of handling large volumes of email to external recipients, Microsoft will propose Email Communication Services (ECS). Built on top of Exchange Online, ECS shares some characteristics with the High Volume Email (HVE) solution. After testing both, HVE is probably a better solution if you have a Microsoft 365 tenant.
