Exchange Online

The Office 365 Substrate uses Exchange Online mailboxes to store a lot of data that users never see. The data is used by the substrate for different purposes, mostly to make it easier for features to get to relevant information. Microsoft doesn’t document exactly what is stored, where it is stored, and how it is used, so we must poke around in the innards of mailboxes to see what we can discover.

Old Exchange Online Admin Center Due for Replacement You might have noticed that the Exchange Online Admin Center (EAC) is showing its age. Compared to the other workload admin centers in Office 365, EAC is positively creaking at the seams, much like myself. At the Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft said that they are working on…

A New Start for Exchange PowerShell Last November, Microsoft announced a refresh of the Exchange Online PowerShell module at the Ignite 2019 conference. The big change was the introduction of nine cmdlets built on REST APIs to replace older cmdlets like Get-Mailbox and Get-MailboxStatistics. These cmdlets have been part of Exchange PowerShell since its introduction…

Office 365 tenants often want to journal email from Exchange Online mailboxes. Things become a little more complicated when protected email is involved, but Exchange can decrypt protected messages and create journal reports with attachments containing the original encrypted message and a decrypted copy. That should be enough for journaling systems to process the journal reports and import messages into their repositories.

Publicity for Exchange for a Change I’ve been impressed by the amount of coverage given by mainstream IT reporters to Thursday’s announcement by the Exchange development group that they are rolling out a feature to suppress Reply-All storms. Few of the recent announcements by the Exchange group have received such attention, possibly because Teams hoovers…

Autoforwarding is Badness Allowing users to forward their email outside Exchange Online is bad, especially if they don’t keep a copy of the forwarded messages in their mailbox. Apart from removing email from the controls imposed by data governance policies, it creates a risk that confidential information travels outside the organization, including when an attacker…

Microsoft will remove the Search-Mailbox cmdlet from Exchange Online on July 1, but that doesn’t mean you can’t purge bad messages from user mailboxes. Office 365 content searches and content search actions can hard- or soft-delete messages. Some limitations exist, but not enough to be worried. And we include a PowerShell script to show how to get the job done.

Microsoft fixed the copy-on-write bug in Outlook for Windows in Exchange Online. The fix stops users removing attachments from sent or received messages. A strong case can be made that the fix should have been present from the start to stop any possibility that clients could comprise Exchange Native Data Protection. Microsoft doesn’t think many people were affected and they could be right, but that doesn’t make the problem any easier to swallow.

A bug in Outlook desktop’s implementation of the MAPI over HTTP protocol allows users whose mailboxes are on hold to remove attachments from messages. The removal is not captured by the copy-on-write feature of Exchange Online Native Data Protection, which potentially compromises the ability of Data Governance managers or eDiscovery investigators to recover information needed for compliance purposes. All in all, it’s a mess that Microsoft needs to clean up quickly.

A recent change made to the way that Exchange Online processes notifications for calendar meetings has upset some Office 365 users because they don’t see the email. Instead of leaving the notification email in the Inbox, Exchange processes the update in the calendar and moves the notification to the Deleted Items folder, meaning that it might be missed. Which makes some people mad.