Microsoft intends to make the Exchange Online plus addressing feature available by default to all Microsoft 365 tenants after April 17, 2022. If you don’t want this to happen, you need to update the Exchange Online organization configuration to update the DisablePlusAddressInRecipients setting to True. After the opt-out 30-day period finishes, Microsoft will proceed with the deployment, so don’t say you weren’t warned!
It seems like it should be possible to transfer a membership rule from an Exchange dynamic distribution list to a dynamic Microsoft 365 group/team, but it’s not. Different directories, schemas, properties. and syntax conspire to stop easy conversion. It’s a pity, but that’s the way life and technology sometimes go…
This article explains how to create a new Microsoft 365 group and team using the membership and properties of an Exchange Online dynamic distribution list. The process is reasonably straightforward, but as always with PowerShell, there are some interesting turns and twists that must be navigated en route.
Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer (MRCA) utility is now able to run diagnostics to check connectivity between Teams and an Exchange hybrid organization. MRCA was in the doldrums for several years because no one inside Microsoft had any interest in providing funding for its development and support. Now the utility is roaring back with a set of new tests covering different aspects of Microsoft 365. Recommended!
Microsoft’s latest update for the roadmap item for Outlook roaming signatures puts general availability in July 2022, some two years after the original announcement. It’s a strange delay, even by the standards of the Outlook desktop development cycle. ISVs who make signature management software have used the delay to good effect to improve their products, so it remains to be seen what effect Outlook roaming signatures will have on that market.
Microsoft 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies have wide-ranging capabilities when it comes to rules and exceptions. One exception covers the various types of encrypted email that can pass through the Exchange Online transport pipeline. As it happens, three message types are supported, but who could have guessed that permission controlled means rights management?
Delegates often process Outlook email for others. It’s a feature that works well. That is, until protected email arrives. Delegates shouldn’t be able to read protected email in other peoples’ mailboxes. But some versions of Outlook allow this to happen. If you want to be sure that delegates can’t access protected email, maybe you should consider using a dual-mailbox approach.
A new Microsoft Teams feature means that local time zone information appears on user profile cards. While it seem simple, the feature is very useful when arranging meetings because you know up-front about the working hours of your colleagues. It’s a detail that makes sense!
A post by the Exchange development group tried to explain why mailboxes have SharePoint Online proxy addresses. It’s all down to the Microsoft 365 substrate, which needs the proxy addresses to ingest digital twins from SharePoint Online into Exchange Online for use by shared services like Microsoft Search. The upshot is that you can’t remove a mailbox permanently without some background processes kicking in to make sure that SharePoint is taken care of.
Microsoft announced the preview of the Send from Email Aliases feature on January 25. The only problem is that the same feature was released in April 2021. And OWA gained full support for it in October 2021. So why would Microsoft reissue an existing feature? They’re not saying, but I suspect it’s down to fixing some issues in the Exchange Online transport service to make sure that messages sent from an email alias work properly in every circumstance.
Outlook desktop couldn’t display actionable messages generated by Teams and Yammer properly while OWA and Outlook mobile could. It’s a small issue in the context of Microsoft 365, but it irritated me. I fixed the problem but don’t know how except that the Actionable Messages Debugger for Outlook might have been involved. Another day in the life of a Microsoft 365 tenant administrator…
Office 365 Message Encryption protection is not available for messages sent to dynamic distribution groups. It’s all to do with rights management licensing. However, if you need to protect messages sent to dynamic distribution groups, for instance to make sure that confidential messages are inaccessible to external recipients use a sensitivity label instead and assign the special tenant-wide permission to recipients.
Finding the age of a Microsoft 365 tenant isn’t an important administrative operation. However, understanding how to retrieve this information (if asked) is an interesting question, which is why we spent several hours playing around with PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph to figure out how to answer the question. It’s the kind of in-depth analysis we do all the time to build content for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.
Planner now creates digital twins (copies) of tasks in user mailboxes in Exchange Online to make data available for eDiscovery and compliance. Storing items in the Microsoft 365 substrate is the same approach to making data available for search and compliance as taken by Teams and Yammer.
Microsoft pushed out version 2.0.88.0 of the AAD Connect synchronization utility earlier this month. Unfortunately, the new software removes disabled on-premises user accounts from Azure AD, which means that on-premises shared mailboxes disappear for cloud users. Microsoft has released version 2.0.89.0 but maybe it’s better to go back to a version that you know works. At least until after the holidays.
To make Microsoft 365 DLP policies work like Exchange transport-rule based DLP, a January change will switch evaluation of sender conditions away from envelope information to message headers. Although this change might seem to be something beloved of email geeks, it’s actually an important update for organizations who want to move away from ETR-based DLP to Microsoft 365 DLP policies.
It might seem like a small thing, but some users are upset when they don’t receive copies of their messages sent to Outlook Groups in their Inbox. A new setting allows users and administrators to control if they receive copies of messages from groups, but only when the user is a subscriber to groups (Follow in Inbox is turned on). In this article, we explore how to set the EchoGroupMessageBackToSubscribedSender control via OWA options and PowerShell, and how to sign up to be a group subscriber by yourself or with a little help from an Exchange administrator.
Microsoft is changing the way the Exchange Online transport service resolves the membership of dynamic distribution groups. Instead of doing this when someone sends a message to a dynamic group, Exchange resolves the membership once daily and whenever the recipient filter changes. It’s a reasonable approach designed to make messages move faster and more reliably, and it’s similar to the way that Azure AD dynamic groups maintain their memberships, so it shouldn’t make much difference.
Microsoft is removing TLS 1.0 and 1.1 from Microsoft 365. This has been well flagged, but tenants might not understand the impact on PowerShell scripts which send email using the Send-MailMessage cmdlet and SMTP AUTH. In a nutshell, unless you force PowerShell to use TLS 1.2, attempts to send messages via Exchange Online will fail. It’s time to check those scripts and ,consider how to move away from SMTP AUTH and Send-MailMessage.
The SharePoint Online admin center displays an insight card for the number of unlabeled sites in the tenant. For some reason, many of the labels assigned to Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams had not reached SharePoint. Some PowerShell does the job to fetch the sensitivity label information from Exchange Online and update sites with the missing label information.
To help you recover from the blizzard of Microsoft 365 information released at Fall Ignite 2021, here are some notes about features and functionality you might have missed. Like any list created by a conference (virtual) attendee, it reflects my interests and what I was looking for. Feel free to disagree on the importance of any or all of the topics discussed here… and suggest some of your own in the comments.
Exchange Online transport (mail flow) rules are a powerful way to manipulate messages as they pass through the transport system. In this example, we look at how to BCC messages sent by some employees for management review. I’m not sure that this is a good idea (for many reasons), but the need does exist to copy messages automatically, so we explore the use of transport rules as a solution.
Every Exchange Online tenant has four mailbox plans. Exchange uses the plans to populate some important mailbox settings based on the license assigned to the mailbox owner. This article explains the four mailbox plans, how to update the plan settings, and some of the things you can’t do with mailbox plans. We also include some PowerShell to report the mailbox plans assigned to users in your Office 365 tenant.
A new Microsoft 365 DKIM management page is a good prompt to check that all domains used to send email in n Office 365 tenant are configured properly for DKIM. The process of enabling DKIM and key rotation is easily done through the GUI or PowerShell once the correct CNAME records are in DNS.
Most Microsoft 365 tenants will have to manage the mailboxes of ex-employees. Retention policies are an excellent method to achieve this goal, if you remember to add mailboxes to a suitable retention policy before deleting their Azure AD account. In this article, we consider Microsoft’s recommendation to use a specific retention policy for inactive mailboxes and how to go about using such a policy.
The road to modern authentication for Exchange Online is littered with things to do. One action item is to check Apple iOS and iPad devices using Exchange ActiveSync to connect to mailboxes. If these devices were configured to connect to Exchange Online before iOS 12, they’re likely using basic authentication. Right now, the only way to move them to modern authentication is to remove Exchange from the mail app and add Exchange again. It’s a bump on the way to modern authentication in October 2022.
A reader request asked how to force users to send read receipts. This is a client-side feature so the settings involved differ from client to client. We explore how to control them in OWA and Outlook for Windows. A mixture of PowerShell and system registry settings help create a solution. We’re leaving figuring out how to manage other clients to our readers.
A Microsoft October 5 announcement gives a clear signal that Exchange Web Services is on a short runway to oblivion. The first step is the removal of 25 APIs on March 31, 2022. It’s all part of the master plan to get Office 365 tenants and ISVs to move to the Microsoft Graph APIs. This is a perfectly laudable ambition but it’s complicated because of the lack of suitable Graph APIs to handle the volume of Exchange data involved in scenarios like backup/restore and migration. Teams has a new Graph Export API, but it introduces consumption metering and charging. Is a new Exchange API coming and will it use the same charging mechanism? We live in interesting times…
A recent update to OWA adds the option to allow users to choose which proxy addresses assigned to a mailbox they would like to send messages from. It’s a small change which completes the client support for the earlier server-side update to allow users to send using mailbox proxies, and it makes using proxy addresses more approachable and useful. OWA also includes a drop-down list in the compose message screen to allow users to select an address to send from, and makes sure that message headers are updated correctly so that messages go back to the right address.
A new Microsoft Editor feature aims to make OWA messages more polite through “tone detection.” Currently only available for U.S. English, Editor scans for impolite text and comes up with suggested replacement text. The results vary from very good to not so good, but this might be because it takes time for a learning model to accumulate enough information about a user’s writing style to be able to detect impolite text accurately. We’ll know over time.
A change rolling out in mid-October will remove storage pressure on the Recoverable Items structure in Exchange Online mailboxes by offloading some data to archive mailboxes. The idea is a good one because it means that the storage allocated to Recoverable Items won’t fill up and require intervention so often. Users won’t know anything about what’s happening under the covers as it’s all hidden from view.
A 1.5 TB limit applies to Exchange Online archive mailboxes from November 1, 2021. In this article, we use PowerShell to report how close expandable archives are to the new limit. In reality, not many archive mailboxes will approach the new limit, but it’s nice to know things like the daily growth rate for an archive and how many days it will take for an archive to reach 1.5 TB. All whimsical stuff calculated with PowerShell!
Last week’s announcement that Exchange Online will block basic authentication for multiple protocols on October 1, 2022, got some attention. Now the hard choices of what to do with clients and applications need to be made. To smoothen the path to remove basic authentication, Microsoft is making an exception for SMTP AUTH. Your scripts and multi-function devices will keep working after October 2022, but the writing is on the wall and eventually even SMTP AUTH will stop working.
October 1, 2022 will be a big day for Exchange Online tenants because that’s when Microsoft starts to disable basic authentication for connectivity protocols whether or not tenants want this to happen. This is a huge and fundamental change that’s being driven by the need to increase the overall security of Exchange Online and individual tenants, while also blocking common attacks seeking to compromise user accounts. With only a year to go, it’s time to start work on preparing everything that needs to be in place for the great October 1 switchoff.
Inactive mailboxes have been available in Exchange Online since 2015. A new inactive mailboxes listing is available in the Microsoft 365 compliance center. The GUI isn’t very functional, but perhaps it’s a starting point for some enhanced management capabilities for inactive mailboxes. We’ve only been waiting six years…
By default, Exchange Online allows other users in your tenant to see limited details of your availability when scheduling meetings. More information can be displayed by updating the calendar permissions for mailboxes. This is easy to do with PowerShell, but needs to be done on an ongoing basis because Exchange Online doesn’t have an organization or mailbox plan setting to assign the value to new mailboxes.
Microsoft wants to eliminate the Search-Mailbox cmdlet, but it’s still very valuable when the time comes to remove mailbox items because of a spam attack or similar reasons. The suggested replacement is Core eDiscovery searches and associated content search purge actions, but these are slower and less effective than Search-Mailbox. To prove the point, we’ve put together a demonstration script to show how to compose a search query and run it against a set of mailboxes.
Microsoft is applying their Viva brand to the features currently known as MyAnalytics. Viva Insights will span a monthly email digest, the Outlook insights add-on, and the Insights dashboard. If you don’t want users to access these features, you can disable the features individually or remove the service plan from user licenses. The rebranding is happening now and due to complete in November.
Azure AD administrators should be able to assign a reserved alias to a new group. At least, that’s what the documentation says. As it turns out, this isn’t strictly true as there are places where administrative interfaces (GUI and PowerShell) block any attempt to use reserved aliases. Does this matter? Probably not, unless you like consistency… which we do!
Microsoft hopes to accelerate the removal of TLS 1.0 and 1.2 connections from Exchange Online by disabling connectivity in 2022 and forcing organizations which need to use the older protocols to connect to a new “legacy smtp” endpoint. It’s not a bad plan because it transfers responsibility for choosing to use obsolete connections to customers. Most organizations will go with the flow (no pun intended) and use TLS 1.2, but those who need some time to update applications and devices know what they have to do.
