Office 365 external domain restriction (Resolved) Investigating / Notice
27 days

ExchangeDefender is making a change in relaying policy for Office365/M365 users: we are discontinuing unauthenticated relay for domains that aren't protected by ExchangeDefender. If you are sending email from your M365 tenant and the domain you are sending from is not protected by ExchangeDefender you will get the following error:


550 ExchangeDefender is not allowed to send mail on behalf of your email address.     
        See https://exchangedefender.com/docs/configure-outbound-smart-host-office-365#/microsoft-365-xd-outbound-limitation


The policy of relaying email on behalf of 3rd party domains (who are not protected by ExchangeDefender) dates back to late 1990s long before things like SPF and DKIM. Back in the long, long ago we allowed clients to relay mail through our network from any domain - this functionality was required for mail enabled contacts and forwarding of email was a frequent practice. We've kept that practice up with cloud deployments because sometimes internal apps and processes may send email through the tenant that routes all mail through ExchangeDefender but every sender domain isn't defined or doesn't receive email (notification services).


Unfortunately this legacy feature has become a source of network abuse and we have to shut it down. Going forward ExchangeDefender will only relay outbound email for the domains that are protected by ExchangeDefender. Any 3rd party / external domains will require a separate connector but we actively discourage you from pursuing that as those messages are nearly certain to end up in Junk/SPAM and will trigger negative domain sender reputation.


In order to continue sending from external domains you must create an IoT account and switch to outbound-auth.exchangedefender.com when relaying from Office 365