Microsoft has rolled out High Volume Email (HVE) for Exchange Online, enabling organizations to send large volumes of automated internal messages without encountering traditional sending limits designed for person-to-person emails.
HVE is a tenant-native feature built specifically for application-to-person communications. It uses dedicated HVE accounts separate from user or shared mailboxes, ensuring automated messages do not interfere with normal employee email workflows. All mail sent through HVE remains within Microsoft infrastructure and is subject to Exchange Online’s existing security, compliance, and policy controls. Administrators can configure and manage HVE through the Mail flow section in the Exchange admin center.
Key use cases
HVE is intended for transactional and operational messaging to internal recipients. Microsoft identifies its primary applications as payroll and HR notifications, IT monitoring and service alerts, line-of-business application messaging, device-driven workflows such as printers and scanners, and security or compliance alerts.
Jeremy Carlson, Director of Product Marketing for M365 Portfolio Growth at Microsoft, clarified that HVE “does not include campaign tooling, templates, or engagement tracking. Instead, it supports the high-trust, high-reliability use cases that organizations depend on every day.”
Pricing and availability
HVE is now generally available. Usage will be metered starting June 1, 2026, based on the number of expanded email recipients. Microsoft has set the cost at $42 per one million recipients, equivalent to $0.000042 per recipient, aligning pricing with internal email volume.
Infrastructure advantages
For organizations previously using on-premises Exchange servers, third-party SMTP relays, or repurposed user mailboxes to handle high-volume automated emails, HVE provides a streamlined solution to consolidate this traffic within Microsoft 365. The service requires no additional infrastructure or third-party dependencies, running natively within an existing Exchange Online tenant.
#From helpnetsecurity.com