Autoforwarding in Exchange Online falls over due to a problematic spam rule deployment

As Microsoft's public-facing engineers were basking in the, er, glow of the company's Build event, those in the backrooms were scrambling to shore up the cloud giant's perennially wobbling services. Following an unscheduled lie down by Microsoft-owned code shack GitHub yesterday, Exchange Online services took a nap today. We' …

[Anonymous Coward]

A feature, not a bug

I won't say all auto-forwarded emails are spam, but it sure seems like it. I assume that if any were important I'd eventually hear about it.

[J. Cook]

And then they wonder why people like holding on to on-premise installations that just work...

[J. Cook]

Although to be totally fair, The spam detection thing is a poorly documented, poorly controlled bolt-on service for the Edge Transport role, which is something that most respectable organizations use a third party smart host for that functionality. The best thing to do with it if you are forced to use an edge transport server in conjunction with a hosted email security appliance is to disable the spam filtering on the edge transport service completely, and even then, it still will pop up for user-created blacklists, which is even worse, because half the time the only thing you'll get is the poor person that accidently blocked them saying "hey, I'm no longer getting legit emails from [e-mail]" and find out that they tossed them into a blocklist two weeks ago because the sender also sends them garbage emails on top of legit ones...

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider yourself lucky. When I get such reports, I very rarely get something as useful as an email address to key off.

> "I'm not getting emails from Jim at Acme Corp any more"

< "OK, is that jim@, james@, jim.smith@, james.smith@, jsmith@, ..."

> "I don't know. I think he uses gmail"

< "Ah, alright, I know how to fix this. Let me just find my cattle prod"

[Pascal Monett]

An unscheduled lie down, eh ?

It would seem that the results are pretty clear : since Borkzilla borgified GitHub, things have gone worse.

Now the real question is : who is surprised ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exchange?

I wish people would stop calling exchange an email system!

[Pirate Dave]

Yeah

I think there were 4 or 5 different admin notifications that popped up in Outlook today where MS was advising that various services were having issues. Obviously they're rolling out something semi-major on the backend and it broke things.

As a long-time sufferer of the frequently unstable crap-fest that Microsoft calls "Microsoft365/Office365", I just wish they'd come out with a Long Term Support branch that we could opt our tenant into where they won't fuck with things for like 2-4 years. No feature upgrades, no "improvements", no GUI redesign, no major changes, just bug and security fixes for a few years, and software and servers that do what they're supposed to every day. Imagine that - a consistent, reliable, STABLE version of O365 that will work and look the same for 2 or 3 years. That would almost make it bearable. But this constant fucking around, mostly just so they can continuously sing about how they're coming out with new awesomeness, is the pits. Makes me long for the days of running Groupwise 6.5. Ah well, only 13 years to retirement...then fuck'em.

[The Dark Side Of The Mind (TDSOTM)]

Re: Yeah

With only 5 years to catch up with yours and noticing that today is Friday... have a cold one from me.

At least we can glimpse more bearable days ahead of us.