5.7.233: Tenant exceeded its daily external recipient limit
Exchange Online returns 5.7.233 (or 5.7.232 for a trial tenant) when the whole tenant has emailed more external recipients in 24 hours than its tenant external recipient rate limit allows. The count is a rolling 24-hour window, and sending to outside addresses resumes once it drops below the limit.
The exact messages
Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online
5.7.233 Your message can't be sent because your tenant exceeded its daily limit for sending email to external recipients (tenant external recipient rate limit)
Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online
5.7.232 Your message can't be sent because your trial tenant has exceeded its daily limit for sending email to external recipients (tenant external recipient rate limit)
Why it happens
- Combined external sending from all mailboxes in the tenant exceeded the tenant limit.
- A trial tenant, which has a lower limit, used for outreach.
How to fix it
- Wait for the rolling 24-hour count to drop.
- Convert a trial tenant to a paid subscription.
- Reduce total external volume from the tenant.
If you send cold email
Adding more mailboxes to one tenant does not raise this ceiling, because it is shared by the whole tenant.
How WarmHawk handles it
WarmHawk never sends more than a mailbox’s own daily cap, spaces sends from one mailbox at least 8 minutes apart with random jitter, and starts a newly warmed mailbox at 5 campaign emails a day, growing 20% a day. A temporary failure is retried with backoff (30 minutes, then doubling) and the lead is suppressed after 4 attempts, so a throttled mailbox is never hammered. How WarmHawk works →
Related bounce codes
- 5.7.236onmicrosoft.com domain hit 100 external recipients
- 5.1.90Daily recipient limit reached
- 5.7.708Access denied, traffic not accepted from this IP
Sources, checked 2026-09-29: Microsoft Learn: NDRs and SMTP errors in Exchange Online · Microsoft Learn: Exchange Online sending limits. Have a different bounce? Paste it into the decoder →
Questions
5.7.233 questions
What does 5.7.233 mean?+
Exchange Online returns 5.7.233 (or 5.7.232 for a trial tenant) when the whole tenant has emailed more external recipients in 24 hours than its tenant external recipient rate limit allows. The count is a rolling 24-hour window, and sending to outside addresses resumes once it drops below the limit.
Is 5.7.233 a temporary or permanent error?+
Permanent. The message will not be retried, and sending it again unchanged will fail the same way until the cause is fixed.
How do I fix 5.7.233?+
Wait for the rolling 24-hour count to drop. Convert a trial tenant to a paid subscription. Reduce total external volume from the tenant.