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Using an Office 365 Transport Rule rule to determine which email address a message was sent to

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In an Office 365/Exchange environment it is possible to have many email aliases associated with your account and receive email on all of those addresses.

However sometimes it can be useful to determine which of those email addresses was used when the message is received and this information is not presented by default.

One way to achieve this is to use a transport rule on the message to modify the message in some way as to make the email address that the message was sent to easily identifiable.

Create an additional email alias to receive the mail

The first step in this process is to ensure the mailbox that you are going to be sending the message to has got an additional email address that you want to receive messages on.  I used “[email protected]”.

Once you have created the alias and ensured you can receive email on it we can create the transport rule which will enable us to identify when messages are sent to that address.

Create an Office 365 Transport Rule to modify the message subject to make it identifiable

The next step is to create a transport rule to examine the message header so that the subject is modified to make the alias that the email was sent to easy to recognize.

  1. Login to your Office 365 Admin portal and go to Exchange administration.
    Go into Exchange Administration in Office 365 Admin Center
  2. Go into the “Mail Flow” section.
    Office 365 Exchange Administration - Mail Flow Option
  3. Click the add button and select the option to create a new rule.
    Office 365 Admin - Creating a new transport rule
  4. The new transport rule window will be displayed.
    1. Give your transport rule an appropriate name
    2. Click the “more options” link at the bottom of the window.
    3. Under the “Apply this rule if…” option, select “A message header…” and then “Matches these text patterns”
      Office 365 - Creating a new transport rule
    4. Click on the “Enter text…” link and and enter the word “to” (without brackets) in the specify header name field and click OK.
      Office 365 - Specify Message Header name for transport rule
    5. Click on “Enter text patterns…” and enter the email address for the messages that you are trying to identify and click the plus symbol to add it, then click “ok”.
      Office 365 - Specifying words for transport rule
    6. From the “Do the following” menu option choose “Prepend the subject of the message with…”
      Prepending the subject of an email using an Exchange Online transport rule
    7. Enter the text that you would like prepend to the message subject line. e.g.
      Prepending text to an email subject using Office 365 Exchange online transport rule
    8. Add any additional conditions that you would like to apply and then click “ok”.
  5. Save the transport rule.
  6. Send an email to the address that you are trying to identify and you should see that the subject line has been amended to reflect your newly created rule.

You may find that when you send an email to the specified address immediately after creating the rule that it is not applied. I found that I had to wait for a few minutes before it started working.

 

 

Office 365, Windows XP and Office 2010 availability

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Windows 7 is a requirement for Office 2013, so what if you want to connect a Windows XP or Vista user to Office 365?

You may have come up against the problem of signing up or wanting to sign up to Office 365 but having some users stuck on Windows XP or Vista. As Office 2013 is not supported on Windows XP or Vista you may feel like you are stuck.

Office 2010 does  work with Windows XP and Vista but it can be difficult to get hold of and buying an old version of Office if you can even find it is not ideal.

This has been a small stumbling block for me with a few customers until recently when I realized that Office 2010 is actually available to download and install from the Office 365 portal!

Download Microsoft Office 2010 for Windows XP or Vista from the Office 365 portal

This option is actually quite well hidden.  To download Office 2010 from Office 365 do the following:

  1. Login to the Office 365 Admin Center at https://portal.microsoftonline.com
  2. Click on “service settings”
    Office 365 Admin Center for downloading Office 2010 Professional Plus
  3. Click on “User Software” and you under the section “software for PC” you should see a “previous versions” heading.
    How to download Office 2010 for Office 365 from the Office 365 Admin Center

Although support for Windows XP is ending soon, this may still be very useful for some environments. This option enables users in mixed environments to connect to 365 platform during the transition to newer operating system platforms. This is a very handy feature which is too well hidden in my opinion and actually very useful.

 

Office 365: Forward email to an external address with Powershell

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The Office 365 Admin Portal allows you to forward a users email to another mail contact easily. But it does not allow you to forward email for a user to an external address which has not been created in your tenant. However, you can do this with PowerShell, and here is how to do it using the Set-Mailbox cmdlet. For example:

Set-Mailbox -Identity [email protected] -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true -ForwardingSMTPAddress [email protected]

The DeliverToMailboxAndForward Parameter

If set to $true then DeliverToMailboxAndForward parameter of the Set-Mailxbox cmdlet will deliver mail to both the forwarding address and the original recipient. However, if it is set to $false, it will deliver mail only to the forwarding address.

Use PowerShell to forward email to an external address

  1. Fill in the form below and the correct PowerShell code will be created for you.
  2. Then choose if you would like the mail delivered only to the forwarding address, or to the forwarding address and the original mailbox.

If you want to disable the forward in the future simply enter $null as the address that you would like to forward to and the forwarding will be cancelled.

Security Warning

After you make the changes above the administrators of your Office 365 Account may receive a warning message informing them this change has taken place:

Image showing Low Level Security Warning from Office 365 when a new Mail Redirection has been created.
Security Warning from Office 365

I hope this post was helpful to you, if you want to learn how to remove a forwarding, please check out this post.

Error 80070005 using Office 365 to send-as from a Shared Mailbox or Distribution Group

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When trying to send email from a different address in Outlook on Office 365 you may receive Error 80070005 :

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject:    test
Sent: 18/03/2014 14:26

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

'[email protected]' on 18/03/2014 14:26
This message could not be sent. Try sending the message again later, or contact your network administrator.  Error is [0x80070005-00000000-00000000].

Error 80070005 in Outlook when using Office 365 to Send-as from a shared mailbox or distribution group

 Quite a few people have reported that creating a new Outlook profile solves the problem but this did not work for me. I believe the cause of the issue in those instances is related to the auto-complete cache in Outlook.

Add the correct send-as permissions using Powershell to resolve Error 80070005

Even though I had already added the correct send-as permissions within the Office 365 web based administration system I decided to try adding them again within Powershell to see if this gave any different results.

After adding the permissions with Powershell I was able to send-as no problem at all and the error 80070005 ceased.

Adding send-as permissions with Powershell is easy and I have written a separate post on how to do it here

 

How to give send as permission in Office 365 Using Powershell

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Granting “Send As” permissions on Office 365 permits a user to send mail from using an email address assigned to another user or other mail enabled object, such as a distribution group.

Use the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlet to give “Send As” permissions to a user. For example:

Add-RecipientPermission "Sales Group" -AccessRights SendAs -Trustee "Paulie"

Powershell to grant send-as permissions

Fill the form below and the required Powershell will be generated for you.

  • Fill the “Identity” field to with the target object that you want to to send as.
    Can be any value that uniquely identifies the object such as Alias, email address etc.
  • The “Trustee” is the user or group to whom you want to grant access
  • Copy the automatically generated code into a Powershell window and the change will be made.

If successful, your PowerShell should look something like this:

Image showing Powershell Window adding send as permissions on an Office 365 account
Successfully added send-as permission.

Hope this helps 🙂