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Pricing for HVE Announced Effective June 1, 2026
In March 2026, Microsoft announced that general availability of the Exchange Online High-Volume Email (HVE) solution was imminent. On April 1, 2026, HVE duly attained general availability in a Technical Community post that revealed details of pricing amongst other things.
Paying to Send to Internal Recipients
The headline rate for HVE is $42 (U.S.) per one million email recipients, or $0.000042 per recipient. All recipients are internal because HVE doesn’t support sending email outside the tenant.
At first glance, the pricing is much lower than Azure Email Communication Service (ECS), which quotes $274 to send one million messages to external recipients. However, this is not an apple-to-apple comparison because one charges on a per-recipient basis while the other charges on a per-message basis. It’s entirely possible that each message will have a single recipient, but that’s not always the case.
ECS cites an average email size of 0.2 MB for the estimate cited above. The larger the message, the more you’ll pay. Increasing the size to 1 MB moves the dial to $370 according to the Azure price calculator. By comparison, HVE sets an upper limit of 10 MB per message.
Sending email with ECS isn’t difficult (here’s an example of using ECS to send an Outlook newsletter), if you have a moderate acquaintance with PowerShell. ECS comes with features that HVE doesn’t have, such as tracking message delivery. You can argue that this kind of feature isn’t necessary for an internally-facing email service because tools like message tracing for internal recipients are available out-of-the-box.
Configure a Billing Policy
After June 1, 2026, Microsoft will charge for HVE on a pay as you go (PAYG) basis through a credit card attached to an Azure subscription. To make sure that you can keep on using HVE after Microsoft enables charging, you’ll need to create a billing policy through the Pay as you go option under Billing in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Creating a billing policy essentially links a valid (active) Azure subscription with a PAYG service. During setup, you should create a new Azure resource group for HVE processing (Figure 1) because this will make Azure billing easier to understand. You can choose an existing resource group if you wish.
During setup, you get a chance to set a budget for the billing policy. This is to make sure that the PAYG service doesn’t exceed the expected level of cost during the monthly billing period. You can configure a mail-enabled security group to receive notifications when a budget percentage threshold is reached (Figure 2).
The final step is to assign the billing policy to the HVE service (Figure 3). Once connected, HVE will be ready to meter processing and generate charges to the credit card connected through the policy when Microsoft enables billing for HVE on June 1, 2026.
Billing Policy Management via PowerShell
PowerShell cmdlets are available to view and manage billing policies (see the Microsoft documentation for managing HVE). I don’t imagine that many will use PowerShell to manage billing policies because the admin UX works well, but here’s an example of running the Get-BillingPolicy cmdlet to view the details of the policy created above.
Get-BillingPolicy -ResourceType HVE
Id : c3601166-04c3-407b-9cf9-af7a5fa70bfe
FriendlyName : HVE Email Policy
IdentityType : Tenant
IdentityId : a662313f-14fc-43a2-9a7a-d2e27f4f3478
FeatureSet : {HighVolumeEmail}
TenantId : b662313f-14fc-43a2-9a7a-d2e27f4f3478
SubscriptionId : 35429342-a1a5-4427-9e2d-551840f2ad25
SubscriptionState : Registered
ResourceGroupName : HVE
ResourceProviderName : Microsoft.Syntex/accounts
AzureRegion : West Europe
ResourceUri : /subscriptions/35429342-a1a5-4427-9e2d-551840f2ad25/resourceGroups/HVE/providers/Microsoft.Syntex/accounts/c3601166-04c3-407b-9cf9-af7a5fa70bfe
CreateDate : 21/04/2026 20:48:53
LastModifiedDate : 21/04/2026 20:50:42
What’s interesting here is that the resource provider name is Microsoft.Syntex, usually something that’s associated with SharePoint Online. This is likely explained by Exchange Online adopting the same PAYG billing mechanism as used by SharePoint services such as document translation.
All the cmdlets are in the Exchange Online management PowerShell module.
Setting a Reply-to Address for HVE Accounts
One thing that you will want to do with PowerShell is create a reply-to address for HVE accounts. This is a recent improvement to eliminate the problem of how to handle responses to HVE messages. Until recently, if a recipient replied to a message, the response when into a black hole because HVE accounts don’t have mailboxes. By configuring the accounts with a reply-to address, Exchange Online can redirect messages to a “real” address. This code shows what I did to find all HVE accounts in the tenant and set the same address (for a shared mailbox) for each.
[array]$HVEAccounts = Get-MailUser -HVEAccount
ForEach ($Account in $HVEAccounts) {
Set-HVEAccountSettings -Identity $Account.WindowsEmailAddress -ReplyTo "cServices@office365itpros.com"
}
Two Bulk Email Solutions When One Will Do
Now that HVE is generally available, Microsoft 365 tenants have a choice of two email platforms for bulk email (well, hybrid tenants can continue using Exchange Server and forget about the cloud platforms). Both HVE and ECS are built on Exchange Online. Both charge to send email. Wouldn’t it make a heap of sense to create just one bulk email platform that can handle both internal and external traffic? And while creating a unified bulk email platform, make sure that it’s much easier to use than either solution is today, especially for hardware devices like printers.
Organizational politics within Microsoft and available budgets might get in the way of creating a single unified bulk email platform built on Exchange Online, but it’s the right long-term direction.
Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.