Will Microsoft do another release of old gamertags like they did in 2016? If so, when will...

They won't do another mass release of gamertags. They changed the policy in 2016 and if a person doesn't sign into their Xbox account within 5 years, the gamertag will be freed up. As of 2019, if a person doesn't sign into their Microsoft account within 2 years, the account will be closed which should also free up the tag. However, they also created a new gamertag policy in 2019 so you can use the same gamertag as someone else, you will just be given a suffix to differentiate the 2 accounts. So if you're looking to have the tag without the suffix, then the original tag would have to be freed up and no one else using it.

Hi, the current policy (as of late 2016) is that inactive gamertags will expire after 5 years of inactivity for the Microsoft account with which the gamertag is associated. Note that if an account is still signing into other Microsoft services, that account
is still active, so the gamertag would not be freed up (unfortunately this may make it difficult to know if/when a specific gamertag will be free). Additionally, this policy means there won't be another mass releasing of unused gamertags like the one in early
2016. Hope that helps to clarify!

When the mass gamertag release was done none of those gamertags were from accounts that had permanent bans on them.

Their will most likely not be another Mass gamertag release done the new policy with MS is the account must not be signed in on anything to do with MS for 5 years starting in 2016. So in 2021 any account that had not been signed in for the last 5 years on
anything to do with MS not just Xbox that accounts gamertag will then be released

Hello Chris,

Thanks for posting here on the Xbox Forums. Unfortunately, that means that the gamertag was used already on an account that is no longer active. Those gamertags are not available for use. Microsoft did

release a million of those gamertags back in 2016, but no plans to do that again have been released.

They normally do a press release like this one from the last release of gamertags in 2016: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2016/05/16/xbox-live-gamertag-release/