Updated October 27, 2020: We have updated the rollout timeline below.

Note: This is a reminder that beginning November 9th, 2020 the “Automatic” setting of the Auto Forward Policy will default to “off”, i.e. external forwarding will not be allowed by default. Not updating your policy configuration would negatively impact a user’s ability to forward mail. If you have already configured your Auto Forward Policy to “On” or “Off” no action is required.

As a follow up to MC221119 (August '20), your tenant was identified as having existing users using external forwarding prior to September 01, 2020, and for this reason the “Automatic” setting defaulted to “on”, i.e. external forwarding is allowed. This was to allow your organization additional time to assess the impact and determine the appropriate Auto Forward Policy setting. We are contacting you to inform you that on November 09, 2020 the “Automatic” setting will be updated to “off”, i.e. external forwarding will not be allowed by default.

When will I be impacted by this change

November 09, 2020

What you need to do to prepare

You should review your Auto-Forwarding Policy to verify the expected experience:

1. Use the Auto-forwarded messages report to identify which users in your tenant are automatically forwarding messages outside the organization. Focus on users with either SMTP forwarding or Inbox rules. Exchange transport rules (ETRs) are unaffected by this change.
2. Configure the outbound spam policies to allow automatic external forwarding for either your entire organization or specific users.

For more information, please see Configuring and controlling external email forwarding in Office 365.