Email Services/Office 365/Known Issues

Open Issues

Cached Mode

• Outlook for Windows users not in cached mode do not seem to automatically reconnect. They also report slower performance when compared to on-Premises Exchange
• Cached Mode MUST be enabled for Outlook for Windows in order to connect reliably to Office 365

Apple Mail

• We are seeing issues with Apple mail with the Exchange setup. For certain users with this configuration, Apple mail will appear to stop receiving mail. Sending mail is still possible. Rebuilding the Apple mail profile does not resolve the issue. Apple mail configured to connect to the mailbox via IMAP instead of Exchange does not exhibit the same issue.

Account Management

• When a user account is disabled in on premises Active Directory, it gets moved into the LegacyAccounts Ou. this OU is not synched with Office 365. Because of this, Office 365 assumes the user account has been deleted, and disconnects the mailbox. After 30 days, said mailbox is deleted without the capability for recovery
• Because our current policy states that mailboxes are only kept for 30 days after termination, this is not an issue under normal circumstances.
• If the mailbox in question has been enabled for litigation hold at the time the account is deleted, the mailbox in question will be retained indefinitely as an "Inactive Mailbox". The mailbox is not client accessible and does not receive new mail, but full ediscovery search and recovery capabilities are retained.

Migration Issues

• migration of user with 1,000,000 total items ran for 48 hours with only 5% completion. administrator stopped the migration for review. (see migration report 12-21-15)
• Users with subdomain email addresses as their default email address recieve undeliverables when sending to external recipients. The workaround is to configure their mail client to send through smtp.anl.gov instead of smtp.office365.com. A ticket has been opened with Microsoft to determine the cause of this problem.

Free/Busy calendar time for users with their mailbox associated with a child domain account will NOT be visible to pilot users

• this does not prevent scheduling meetings, but it will be difficult without knowing availability

External Sender recieved 421 #4.4.5 Too many connections from your host when receiving mass mail from a bulk sender

• all messages eventually arrived but it took 72 hours

Office 365 users cannot edit On-Premises Calendars, and vice-versa

• Per Microsoft, this is a limitation of a hybrid Exchange deployment https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2807149

Outlook for Windows users are prompted to log in after migration

• Outlook 2010 users will receive a login prompt each time they log in.
• Outlook 2013 users accessing from most internal networks should not receive a login prompt. If the Outlook 2013 user receives prompts, it is likely due to one of two factors
  • Their default DNS server is set to the external DNS server instead of the internal DNS server
  • The user is not logged in to the client workstation in question with their anl domain account
  • I will note that I have received a login prompt the first time I log in to Outlook 2013 even with the two above criteria in place

Read items being marked as unread

User reports: I'm using Outlook 2016 on OS X. When I open the mail client for the first time the next day, it seems to put a dozen or so of a random set of messages back into an unread state. These are often messages I’ve moved to another folder. They stay in the correct folder, but again a random subset goes back to ‘unread’. I sporadically see messages on my mail app on android do the same. I’m using ‘Nine’ on mobile.

Outlook for Mac 2011 and 2016 users hosted On Premises cannot view Shared Calendars hosted on Office 365

• this is not be supported.
• the workaround is to have the user subscribe to the calendar from within Outlook web access vis .ics or .html subscription. the calendar will then show up in Outlook for Mac
• https://wiki.anl.gov/public/CIS_Email_Services/Office_365#Shared_Calendar_html_and_.ics_addresses

Outlook for Mac 2011 and 2016 users hosted On Office 365 cannot open Room and Resource Calendars hosted on Premises

• this appears to not be supported. only free/busy information is available to Outlook for Mac
• workaround is to use the Web App
• another workaround is to have the user subscribe to the calendar from within Outlook web access vis .ics or .html subscription. the calendar will then show up in Outlook for Mac
• https://wiki.anl.gov/public/CIS_Email_Services/Office_365#Shared_Calendar_html_and_.ics_addresses

Outlook 2016 for Mac does not handle inbox rules properly

• The order of the application of rules was non-deterministic with Office 2016
  • this can be fixed by going into the web client
• Changing multiple rules on Outlook 2016 before sending the changes to the server can result in error messages or even deleted rules
  • workaround is to edit only one rule at a time

Apple Calendar cannot gain access to some shared calendars

• despite appropriate permissions and the ability for the same users to access the affected calendars from all other clients, Apple calendar is not able to gain access to some shared calendars.

Office 365 users in CIS whose machines are running ipv6 are experiencing client connectivity issues and slow performance

• the CIS subnet is the only subnet which is IPv6 enabled. ther are known issues with this implementation. the solution is to disable ipv6 on the affected machines. Networking is aware of and working on the issue, and they have no plans to enable ipv6 on any of the other Lab subnets in the near future.

Office 365 users can no longer manage distribution list membership via Outlook or Outlook Web Client

• Office 365 users can only manage Office 365 objects. since these lists were created on-premises, they can only be managed by On-premises users or administrators.

Dynamic Distribution Lists will not Synch to Office 365

• They must either be recreated in Office 365 or created and managed on premises and a corresponding contact be created in Office 365 to serve as the GAL entry.

Message Attachment size limits are not consistent across Mail Clients

• The Exchange Online Service has a mail attachment size limit of 150 MB, but due to connection timeout constraints, only Outlook for windows is effectively able to send a message that large.

Effective limits by Client

• Outlook for Windows: 150mb
• Outlook for Web: 110mb
• Outlook for mac: ~35mb
• Apple Mail (using Exchange connection): ~35mb
• POP/IMAP: ~25mb

Outlook Web App Users on Premises cannot view Calendars of users in Office 365

• This occurs when the Office 365 user's Calendar has the "default" Permission set to "free/busy only"
• to resolve the issue, the Office 365 user should use Outlook's "share calendar" feature to send the On premises user a calendar sharing link.

Firefox on Linux

• RHEL 7.3, Red Hat kernel: 3-10.0-514.16.1 And gnome-3
• When launching OWA in Firefox\Mozilla version 5.2 users can read the unread messages in the Inbox sequentially but cannot jump over 3 or 4 messages at the time.
• Switching to the Chrome browser resolves the issue