Category: IAmMEC

  • OWA and Conditional Access: Inconsistent Error Reports

    Here is a good error message. Its good, because I could not find any references to it on Google and the fault was nothing to do with the error message: The error says “something went wrong” and “Ref A: a long string of Hex Ref B: AMSEDGE0319 Ref C: Date Time”. The server name in…

  • Bypassing Focused Inbox and Clutter Folders

    For the last few years Exchange Online mailboxes have been processed by a service call Clutter, which moved the less important emails, or indeed the clutter, to a dedicated folder. This is now in the processes of being replaced by the Focused Inbox, which is client version dependant and is all based on views on…

  • Exchange Edge Server and Common Attachment Blocking In Exchange Online Protection

    Both Exchange Server Edge role and Exchange Online Protection have an attachment filtering policy. The default in Edge Server is quite long, and the default in EOP is quite short. There is also a few values that are common to both. So, how do you merge the lists so that your Edge Server attachment filtering…

  • Azure Information Protection General Troubleshooting

    Azure Information Protection (AIP) is the new name, and new features for Azure Rights Management. Azure Information Protection allows a company to create a series of labels to apply to documents and to have those documents tags and labelled. For example a watermark or header is easy to set in the Azure Information Protection management…

  • Exchange Online Archive–Counting Archives

    If you are using Exchange Online Archive and what to get a count of the number of users with an archive, or a list of the users with an archive, then the following PowerShell scripts will give you this info: List all users with an Exchange Online Archive: Get-MailUser -ResultSize Unlimited | where {$_.ArchiveName -ilike…

  • Unable To Remove Office 365 Domain Error

    If you need to remove a domain from Office 365 it needs to not be in use. This includes the services that use that domain, for example an Accepted Domain in Exchange Online. If though you have an expired, maybe test, Office 365 tenant and you want to remove a domain from it you may…

  • Qualifications in Exchange Signatures

    In a recent project I was working with iQ.Suite from GBS and specifically the component of this software that add signatures to emails. The client are an international organization with users in different geographies and we needed to accommodate the users qualifications in their email signature. The problem with this is that in Germany qualifications…

  • Password Writeback Errors

    I had been struggling with password writeback testing and was coming across the following set of errors, and found that searching for them uncovered nothing online. So I wrote this blog to remind me and help you solve these issues. These errors are all visible in the Application log of the Event Viewer. User Restrictions…

  • Configuring Sync and Writeback Permissions in Active Directory for Azure Active Directory Sync

    [Last updated 9th November 2022 – note that Microsoft now include this functionality in their own product as written at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/reference-connect-adsyncconfig#set-adsyncexchangehybridpermissions] [Last updated 11th November 2019 – added support for Exchange Server automapping support, which was announced during Microsoft Ignite 2019 and will be supported in the first half of calendar year 2020. This is…

  • Office 365 MDM (Mobile Device Management) From A Users Perspective

    The following list of steps and screenshots are taken during the enrolment process to add an iPhone and an Android phone to Office 365 once the free MDM solution that comes with Office 365 is enabled for the user. Step Details Image from iPhone Image from Android 1. Once your IT Administrator enables MDM for…

  • Unable To Send Exchange Quota Message

    In Exchange 2013 you can sometimes see the following event log error (MSExchange Store Driver Submission, ID 1012): The store driver failed to submit event <id> mailbox <guid> MDB <database guid> and couldn’t generate an NDR due to exception Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxTransport.StoreDriverCommon.InvalidSenderException   at Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxTransport.Shared.SubmissionItem.SubmissionItemUtils.CopySenderTo(SubmissionItemBase submissionItem, TransportMailItem message)   at Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxTransport.Submission.StoreDriverSubmission.MailItemSubmitter.GenerateNdrMailItem()   at Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxTransport.Submission.StoreDriverSubmission.MailItemSubmitter.<>c__DisplayClass1.<FailedSubmissionNdrWorker>b__0()   at Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxTransport.StoreDriverCommon.StorageExceptionHandler.RunUnderTableBasedExceptionHandler(IMessageConverter converter, StoreDriverDelegate workerFunction). And…

  • Advanced Threat Protection via PowerShell

    I discussed the newly released Advanced Threat Protection product in Office 365 on my blog, and in this article I want to outline the cmdlets that can be used to set this product up from Remote PowerShell to Office 365. To connect to Office 365 via PowerShell take a search on your favourite search engine…

  • Getting Started with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

    Announced a few months ago, Advanced Threat Protection became generally available on 1st June. I have been involved with trialling this product during the beta and so I thought I would note down a few thoughts on setting this up and what to expect now that it is publicly available. Advanced Threat Protection is an…

  • Managing Office 365 Groups With Remote PowerShell

    Announced during Microsoft Ignite 2015, there are now PowerShell administration cmdlets available for the administration of the Groups feature in Office 365. The cmdlets are all based around “UnifedGroups”, for example Get-UnifiedGroups. Create a Group Use New-UnifiedGroup to do this. An example would be New-UnifiedGroup -DisplayName “Sales” -Alias sales –EmailAddress sales@contoso.com The use of the…

  • How To Change Your Office 365 App Password

    If you are enabled for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in Office 365 then you will need an App Password for some applications that do not support MFA. The user interface for creating a new App Password is well hidden in Office 365 (its not on the Password page for example). Post updated in 2016 to take…

  • Exchange OWA and Multi-Factor Authentication

    This article is now out of date Multi-factor authentication (MFA), that is the need to have a username, password and something else to pass authentication is possible with on-premises servers using a service from Windows Azure and the Multi-Factor Authentication Server (an on-premises piece of software). The Multi-Factor Authentication Server intercepts login request to OWA,…

  • SSL and Exchange Server

    In October 2014 or thereabouts it became known that the SSL protocol (specifically SSL v3) was broken and decryption of the encrypted data was possible. This blog post sets out the steps to protect your Exchange Server organization regardless of whether you have one server or many, or whether or not you use a load…

  • The Case of the Disappearing Folders

    Here is a issue I have come across at one of my current clients – you create a folder in Outlook 2013 when in the “Mail” view (showing only mail folders – your typical default view) and the folder does not get created. For example, in the below picture the user is in the middle…

  • Group Policy Import To Fix Google Chrome v37 Issues With Exchange Server and Microsoft CRM

    A recent update to Google Chrome (37.0.2062.120) removed the ability to support modal dialog boxes. This are dialogs that require your attention and stop you going back to the previous page until you have completed the info required – these are very useful in workflow type scenarios. Google claim that as 0.004% of web sites…

  • Speaking at TechEd Europe 2014

    I’m please to announce that Microsoft have asked me to speak on “Everything You Need To Know About SMTP Transport for Office 365” at TechEd Europe 2014 in Barcelona. Its going to be a busy few weeks as I go from there to the MVP Summit in Redmond, WA straight from that event. My session…

  • Exchange Web Services (EWS) and 501 Error

    As is common with a lot that I write in this blog, it is based on noting down the answers to stuff I could not find online. For this issue, I did find something online by Michael Van “Hybrid”, but finding it was the challenge. So rather than detailing the issue and the reason (you…