Performance Issue: Office 365 some forwarded mail blocked
Last Updated:
2017-12-15 20:47:20
Event:
2017-12-06 17:53:00
Status:
Closed
Brief Description:
Some faculty and staff who choose to forward their Cornell email to another destination (for example, Gmail) and who receive a large quantity of spam had their forwarding and ability to send mail from Office 365 blocked.
User Impact:
Mail that Microsoft classifies as spam will not be forwarded out of Office 365. This mail can be reviewed in Outlook on the Web's (outlook.cornell.edu) Junk E-Mail folder.
Workaround:
There is no workaround for this issue
Current Status:
The change has been made, and mail classified as spam by Microsoft is no longer being forwarded. All accounts that had been blocked by this problem are no longer blocked. Anyone who turned off forwarding in order to avoid triggering a spam-related block may resume it if they so choose.
Services Affected:
Email and Calendar
Subsites Affected:
GuestIDs
Full Description:
There was a problem where some faculty and staff who choose to forward their Cornell email to another destination (for example, Gmail) and who receive a large quantity of spam had their forwarding and ability to send mail from Office 365 blocked. A change was made to Cornell’s Office 365 to address the issue on January 15, 2017. Email that Microsoft classifies as spam is no longer forwarded along with the rest of the messages. In order to inspect the email classified as spam, individuals who forward should sign into Outlook on the Web (outlook.cornell.edu) and look in their Junk E-Mail folder.
Timeline of Changes
| Description | Current Status | Date | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| There was a problem where some faculty and staff who choose to forward their Cornell email to another destination (for example, Gmail) and who receive a large quantity of spam had their forwarding and ability to send mail from Office 365 blocked. A change was made to Cornell’s Office 365 to address the issue on January 15, 2017. Email that Microsoft classifies as spam is no longer forwarded along with the rest of the messages. In order to inspect the email classified as spam, individuals who forward should sign into Outlook on the Web (outlook.cornell.edu) and look in their Junk E-Mail folder. | The change has been made, and mail classified as spam by Microsoft is no longer being forwarded. All accounts that had been blocked by this problem are no longer blocked. Anyone who turned off forwarding in order to avoid triggering a spam-related block may resume it if they so choose. | 2017-12-15 | 20:47:20 |
| Some faculty and staff who have chosen to forward their Cornell email to another destination (for example, Gmail) and who receive a large quantity of spam, have had their forwarding and ability to send mail from Office 365 blocked. If this is happening to you: 1. Remove your forwarding settings. 2. Make sure your Office 365 account keeps a copy of your email. This is the default, so unless you changed it, you should be fine. 3. Contact the IT Service Desk at itservicedesk@cornell.edu so CIT can request that Microsoft remove the block. This problem occurs because the forwarded spam is seen as a threat to the destination where the person is choosing to forward their Cornell email. That can trigger the destination to stop trusting the sources of that email, in this case Microsoft and Cornell. When this happens, the destination may start refusing ALL email from anyone at Cornell. To head off this possibility, if Microsoft sees too much spam being sent from a Cornell Office 365 account, including spam that's being forwarded, it shuts down that email account's ability to forward and to send. Why does spam get included when you forward your mail? Office 365 forwarding delivers *all* email to the destination, including junk mail, so people who forward have the same option of reviewing or managing likely spam at the forwarding destination as they have in Office 365. If all mail weren't forwarded, they wouldn't be able to do this. | A change is being made to the handling of mail that Microsoft has classified as spam. This change applies only to individuals who have set their Office 365 mail account to forward to an outside email service. (Because of the way forwarding from Office 365 works, Cmail counts as an outside service.) Beginning the afternoon of Friday, December 15, 2017, email that Microsoft has classified as spam will not be forwarded. If individuals who have set forwarding would like to review these messages, they can go to http://outlook.cornell.edu and on the left side of the page, click More, then Junk E-Mail. (It may not be necessary to click More first to see the Junk E-Mail link.) Aside from the messages classified as spam staying in the Junk folder in Office 365, rather than being delivered to the forwarding destination (where they would likely be placed in the junk folder for that service), users’ experience should remain the same. | 2017-12-15 | 16:56:29 |
| Some faculty and staff who have chosen to forward their Cornell email to another destination (for example, Gmail) and who receive a large quantity of spam, have had their forwarding and ability to send mail from Office 365 blocked. If this is happening to you: 1. Remove your forwarding settings. 2. Make sure your Office 365 account keeps a copy of your email. This is the default, so unless you changed it, you should be fine. 3. Contact the IT Service Desk at itservicedesk@cornell.edu so CIT can request that Microsoft remove the block. This problem occurs because the forwarded spam is seen as a threat to the destination where the person is choosing to forward their Cornell email. That can trigger the destination to stop trusting the sources of that email, in this case Microsoft and Cornell. When this happens, the destination may start refusing ALL email from anyone at Cornell. To head off this possibility, if Microsoft sees too much spam being sent from a Cornell Office 365 account, including spam that's being forwarded, it shuts down that email account's ability to forward and to send. Why does spam get included when you forward your mail? Office 365 forwarding delivers *all* email to the destination, including junk mail, so people who forward have the same option of reviewing or managing likely spam at the forwarding destination as they have in Office 365. If all mail weren't forwarded, they wouldn't be able to do this. | Cornell Information Technologies staff are investigating options to eliminate this problem, and updates will be provided as soon as a solution is identified. | 2017-12-06 | 17:57:38 |