New limit on "proxy" addresses - unable to delete old proxy addresses or add new ones

Hm, didnt know it was changed, but I guess that means the limit cannot be raised over 200 anymore. I'll try to get an answer on that and report back.

To handle the issue, I guess you will have to use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet with a list of 200 or less aliases. By that I mean provide all 200 or so aliases you want as value for the EmailAddresses parameter, instead of trying to remove them one at a time. 

Hi Cheveuxroux69,

According to this article, you can create up to 100 aliases for a user. And the limit is not able to change. In addition, to remove the email alias, you can refer to the following steps:

1. If you are a global admin of your Office 365 organization, sign in to Office 365 admin center.
2. Select Users. On the Active user page, choose the user.
3. On the user’s page, choose Edit.
4. On the Edit email address page, select the alias, and choose Delete.
5. When you are done, choose Save.

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Mouran

Dear Mouran

Thank you for the link, the information in that page is incorrect as I can (currently) have 200 aliases.

However your steps do not work, as I said in my original question. Step 5 will fail unless I delete 125 aliases at once.

I think that I will have to follow Vasil's advice and create a powershell script to create the ones I still want.

I'm still unhappy that this arbitrary limit has been imposed...

@cheveuxroux69

hey you are not alone.  we also use an alias for clients under a business essentials account in our o365 tenant. without warning microsoft started to enforce this policy of limiting proxy addresses about one week ago.the article linked below is definitely confusing as the error message says 200 is the limit, but the article says 100 is limit.

This issue started impacting me yesterday too, but I may have found a workaround (see below).  

I have 249 addresses, and tried deleting many at once and then hitting save.  Sure enough, I didn't select enough to get me below 200, so it rejected all of the deletions that I did try to select.  That's a poor UI in my opinion.

Microsoft: this is very frustrating!  

Please remove the alias limit, or at least raise it to something like 500-1000.  In only a couple of days, you already have evidence that multiple people are using over 200 aliases for legitimate reasons (to identify/isolate/filter clients or businesses and to control potential spam), so adding this restriction late doesn't make sense.  I use many of my aliases as login credentials for various services, so it's going to cause a big mess for me to have to delete those and create new accounts for all of those services.

I did find one possible workaround that I just tested though.

• I created a shared mailbox. (no additional license required)
• I assigned myself as the only member of that shared mailbox.
• I enabled email forwarding for that shared mailbox, and set the forwarding to my primary address (same one that the other aliases all point to).
• I disabled storing a copy of the message in that shared mailbox (to avoid affecting storage limits).
• I created a few email aliases for that shared mailbox.
• I sent a test message to one of those aliases, and it came through just fine.

So, looks like that might provide an additional 100 or maybe 200 additional email aliases per shared mailbox.  

So far, the only limit I see associated with shared mailboxes is your total email storage limit (50GB in most cases).  So, if you disable storing a copy of the messages on the shared mailbox (as I did), I don't think there should be any issue with this approach.

Good luck!

Hi Andy

Thank you for your reply. I resolved the "invalid state" error by deleting most of the aliases in the web interface, then adding them again using a CSV file and a powershell script. It did mean pruning some out.

As MarcusAK notes, I also use many of my aliases as logins for websites so not only have I wasted several hours trying to sort this out, but I am now limited in how I use my account later on.

I like MarcusAK's work-around, I think that I'll use that for some of the older email addresses that I've had to delete.

Looking forward to hearing from the team about why this arbitrary limit was imposed. 

CR69

Hi Cheveuxroux69,

Thanks for your updates. We will post back once we get any updates from there.

Thanks,

Toby

Also suffering the same issue but with a hybrid set up of on site AD syncing to Office 365.

Resolved by manually removing proxies in AD and then performing a Sync, pretty clunky and time consuming. Not to mention the fact this wasn't telegraphed very well by Microsoft to consumers, I only became aware about it when trying to adjust other aspects of a mailbox and receiving the "Invalid state" errors.

Can anybody point me towards any documentation of information about when the change was made and if we ourselves can do anything about it? I have several mailboxes that this is affecting and ideally want to keep those proxy addresses wherever possible.