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Email Forwarding Blocked By Microsoft Outlook

If your invoice forwarding to Rechargly is being rejected, it’s likely due to email security settings that block external forwarding.

Alex Millar avatar
Written by Alex Millar
Updated over 3 weeks ago

In some cases, invoice forwarding from Xero, MYOB or other vendors may fail due to your organisation’s email security settings. This typically results in a 550 5.7.520 Access Denied error, indicating that external forwarding is blocked.

What the email may look like

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

Your message wasn't delivered because the recipient's email provider rejected it.

Diagnostic information for administrators:

Remote server returned '550 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external forwarding. Please contact your administrator for further assistance. AS(7555)'

Why It Was Blocked

When setting up forwarding from Microsoft 365 based email to Rechargly, you may need take an additional step to complete the process. Microsoft 365 accounts default to block automatic email forwarding as part of their outbound spam protection.

This bounce does not mean that Rechargly rejected the message though we know it sounds like that is what it says. Microsoft 365 account is set to not allow automatic external forwarding.

Your Microsoft 365 administrator will need to allow automatic external forwarding for any 365 based email addresses you want to forward to Rechargly.

For Microsoft 365 Administrators

Configuring external email forwarding in Microsoft 365 is Microsoft's documentation of the security features they've put in place. Below you will find a step-by-step guide for changing the specific portion of the automatic forwarding settings needed to work with Rechargly.

Enable Automatic External Forwarding for All Mailboxes

1. Log in to Microsoft 365 Defender as a Microsoft 365 administrator and choose Email & collaboration > Policies & rules > Threat policies > Anti-spam policies or head directly to the Anti-spam settings page: https://security.microsoft.com/antispam

If you do not see those options or no policies display on that page, the Microsoft 365 user you have used to log in does not have sufficient permissions to make these changes. Make sure you are logging in as an administrator for your account.

Note that the policies you see in your own admin may differ from those shown, as these are only the default policies.

2. Click on Anti-spam outbound policy (default) and scroll down to click the Edit protection settings link at the bottom of the sidebar.

3. Find the section called Forwarding Rules, and the dropdown list called Automatic Forwarding Rules. Pull that list down and choose On - Forwarding is enabled. Click Save at the bottom.

Note: This may take 30-60 minutes to come into effect.

Enable Automatic External Forwarding for Individual Mailboxes

1. Log in to Microsoft 365 Defender as a Microsoft 365 administrator and choose Email & collaboration > Policies & rules > Threat policies > Anti-spam policies or head directly to the Anti-spam settings page: https://security.microsoft.com/antispam

If you do not see those options or no policies display on that page, the Microsoft 365 user you have used to log in does not have sufficient permissions to make these changes. Make sure you are logging in as an administrator for your account.

Note that the policies you see in your own admin may differ from those shown, as these are only the default policies.

2. Click + Create policy and choose Outbound.

3. Give your new outbound spam filter policy a Name and Description. Click Next and search to find the user account you want to allow to forward, i.e. the email account that you are forwarding to Rechargly, which will display under the Users field after you select it.


4. Click Next again, scroll down to the Forwarding rules section, and click the dropdown under Automatic forwarding rules. Choose On - Forwarding is enabled, then click Next.


5. Review the settings on the last screen and click Create to create your new outbound policy for the specified user(s).

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