550 5.7.233: your Microsoft 365 tenant hit its daily limit

Paste a 550 5.7.233 bounce to confirm it is the external recipient limit, see what counts toward it, and learn when sending comes back.

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550 5.7.233: Tenant's daily external recipient limitYour organisation (tenant) passed its daily limit for sending to external recipients, the tenant external recipient rate limit.Microsoft 365 ยท Hard bounce ยท No automatic retry
  • The fixWait. Sending to external recipients works again once the count for the last 24 hours falls below the limit. Spread large sends out.
    Why

    Too many external recipients across the whole tenant in a rolling 24 hours.

    Source: learn.microsoft.com (opens in a new tab). Checked Nov 9, 2026.

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1 of 213 codes

  • 550 5.7.233Tenant's daily external recipient limitMicrosoft 365
    What it means
    Your organisation (tenant) passed its daily limit for sending to external recipients, the tenant external recipient rate limit.
    Why it happens
    Too many external recipients across the whole tenant in a rolling 24 hours.
    The fix
    Wait. Sending to external recipients works again once the count for the last 24 hours falls below the limit. Spread large sends out.
    Bounce
    Hard bounce. No automatic retry

    Source: learn.microsoft.com (opens in a new tab). Checked Nov 9, 2026.

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By

ยท CEO & co-founder

Updated Nov 11, 2026

Shorter page: the tool first, the answer in a few lines.

550 5.7.233 means your Microsoft 365 organization passed its daily limit for sending to external recipients, so Exchange Online refused the message. Wait for the count to fall, then resend and spread large sends out. The person you wrote to has nothing to do with it.

The limit counts every external recipient across every mailbox in the tenant. One campaign in the morning can make a colleague's invoice bounce in the afternoon.

How to read the result

Microsoft's sentence reads close to "tenant exceeded its daily limit for sending email to external recipients". Check the exact code, because the neighbours in Microsoft's list of non-delivery reports in Exchange Online count different things:

  • 5.7.232 is the same limit on a trial tenant.

  • 5.7.236 limits mail sent from your onmicrosoft.com address. Add a custom domain and send from it.

  • 5.1.90 and 5.2.2 are about one sender or one mailbox, and both can mean the account is compromised.

  • 5.7.703 is not a limit: your own block list stopped a recipient.

What to do next

  1. Pause the large send. Whatever is still queued adds to the count, and colleagues' external mail keeps bouncing until it falls.

  2. Wait, then resend. Once the window has rolled, send the bounced messages again.

  3. Spread big sends out. A send spread over several days counts against several windows instead of one.

  4. Keep outreach apart from company mail. Cold outreach sits best on its own sending domains and mailboxes, so a busy campaign never spends the allowance your finance and support teams need.

An address that does not exist still counts as an external recipient, so it spends allowance and then bounces on top. Verifying a list before you send keeps those out.

550 5.7.233: common questions

How long does a 550 5.7.233 block last?

It lifts on its own once the tenant's count of external recipients over a rolling window falls back under the limit. The window rolls, so there is no fixed reset time: sending outside the company comes back gradually as older sends age out.

Is 550 5.7.233 a hard bounce?

Yes. It is a permanent failure for that message, so your server does not try it again on its own. Send it again yourself once the limit has lifted; sending it sooner gets the same answer.

Does 550 5.7.233 mean my Microsoft 365 account was hacked?

Not by itself. 5.7.233 is a volume limit. If the bounce says 5.7.705 instead, Exchange Online blocked your tenant's outgoing mail for spam or bulk mail, often from a compromised account, and Microsoft Support has to lift that block.

Should I remove contacts that bounced with 550 5.7.233?

No. The bounce is about your organization's sending volume, not the recipient's address, which may be perfectly fine. Keep them on the list and send again once the limit lifts.

About this article

Photo of Utku Zihnioglu

Utku Zihnioglu

CEO & co-founder

Serial entrepreneur who built infrastructure companies handling billions of requests. Now leads engineering at Oneprofile, which finds the people worth talking to, researches each one, and follows up until they reply.

Drafted with AI from our product docs and code. Utku Zihnioglu answers for what it says.

Keep outreach off your company mail

Oneprofile sends sequences from Google Workspace mailboxes, each with its own daily send limit.

Free plan: 200 credits a month, 3 integrations, no card

Keep outreach off your company mail

Oneprofile sends sequences from Google Workspace mailboxes, each with its own daily send limit.

Free plan: 200 credits a month, 3 integrations, no card