Outlook "Promotions" Tag in Microsoft 365: What It Means for Your Newsletters and Notifications

Short answer: Since late July 2026 Microsoft 365 tags bulk promotional mail as "Promotions" in every tenant, whatever its complaint level; the rollout should finish by the end of October. Admins can also move it to a Promotions folder. Keep transactional mail separate, authenticated and easy to unsubscribe from.

WhoMicrosoft
Statusconfirmed
Dates
  • 2026-07: Worldwide rollout starts (late July): bulk promotional mail gets the Promotions tag, on by default in all tenants
  • 2026-10: Worldwide rollout expected to finish (late October)
  • 2026-11: GCC, GCC High and DoD rollout expected to finish (late November)

Who is affected

Anyone who sends newsletters, marketing or other bulk mail to Microsoft 365 business mailboxes, plus automated mail (invoices, alerts) that Microsoft classifies as bulk. Tenants can't switch the tag off; admins can only exempt chosen senders and decide whether tagged mail moves to a folder.

What you will see

Check your setup today

  1. Send a test to a Microsoft 365 mailbox in another organization (mail from a tenant's own domains is never tagged) and look for the Promotions tag in Outlook on the web.
  2. Open that message's headers and find the BCL value: 0 means not bulk, 1–3 bulk with few complaints, 4–7 mixed complaints, 8–9 many complaints.
  3. Check whether invoices, password resets and alerts leave from the same domain and service as your newsletters.
  4. Run our checker on each sending domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC should all pass. That doesn't remove the tag, but Outlook.com rejects high-volume senders without them (550 5.7.515).

How to fix it

  1. Split your streams: send marketing from a subdomain (for example news.yourdomain.com) and keep transactional mail apart. Microsoft recommends a subdomain for bulk email services so their reputation doesn't affect your main domain.
  2. Keep complaints low, because the BCL rises with them. Make unsubscribing easy with a visible link and a List-Unsubscribe header; Microsoft tells admins to have users look for an unsubscribe option. Microsoft doesn't document either as a way to avoid the tag.
  3. Authenticate every sending domain: one SPF record (SPF generator), DKIM with your own domain, and DMARC (DMARC generator).
  4. Ask business recipients to move your messages out of Promotions. Microsoft says the system learns from these moves for future messages.
  5. For mail that must never be tagged (for example invoices to a client), the recipient's admin can add a mail flow rule that sets X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BulkStamping to 0 for your sender, or add you to their allow list.

Check your domain now

After the fix, send a test email to see SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass on a real message, then keep an eye on it: free DMARC monitoring shows every service that sends mail as your domain and which ones fail, in plain English.

Rather not touch DNS? I set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC without breaking your other senders, with a before/after report.

Get it fixed on Fiverr

Prefer to do it yourself? Get the step-by-step Fix Kit ($15) – 28-page guide, checklist, 20+ providers.

Related pages

Sources

Other upcoming changes