Email messages are undelivered because of too many recipients. What is this number?

Question

Kathleen Ann 0

Emails are not being forwarded because of too many recipients, why? What is too many?

3 answers

Answer 1

Kathleen Ann 0

Maximum of 11 recipients so what is the problem?

Answer 2

Kathleen Ann 0

Why can message not be forwarded to 11 recipients

Answer 3

Emmanuel Santana 32,420 Independent Advisor

Hello. Has your account sent/forwarded a large volume of messages recently? Is this Outlook.com (Hotmail/Live/Outlook) or a work/school account?

And last question, are you forwarding manually, or is this happening through an Outlook rule?

Kathleen Ann 0 Reputation points

2025-12-05T13:36:39.08+00:00

No. it's just a small group of friends. I like to share messages from the RSN or similar. I used to be able to set up group collection of addresses that no longer seems possible on Outlook
Emmanuel Santana 32,420 Reputation points Independent Advisor

2025-12-05T13:51:17.8466667+00:00

Thanks for the update. What you’re seeing usually happens because Outlook.com counts all recipients involved in a forwarded message, not just the ones you manually add. When the original email contains multiple To/Cc addresses, those are carried forward in the message header, and Outlook adds them to your total, which can trigger the “too many recipients” limit even below 11.

Could you check whether the messages you’re forwarding already include several names in the To or Cc fields before you resend them?

A quick workaround you can try is Forward as attachment, which creates a new message without inheriting those original recipients. This helps Outlook count only the people you add. In Outlook.com, you can find this under More actions (…) → Forward as attachment.