Office 365: Hide mail contacts from the Global Address List(GAL)

September 30, 2013 by Paulie 4 Comments

You can hide mail contacts from the GAL using Powershell with the Set-Mailcontact cmdlet. Example:

Set-MailContact -Identity [email protected] -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

Hiding a Mail Contact from the Global Address List in Office 365

The form below will generate the correct PowerShell for you:

Enter the email address of the contact that you would like to hide (or unhide)
Copy the generated code into a PowerShell window.
You will be prompted for your Office 365 Credentials.
The contact will be changed.

Your Powershell session should look something like this:

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Delete email alias from a distribution group with PowerShell

September 25, 2013 by Paulie Leave a Comment

You can remove an alias address from a distribution group in Office 365 using PowerShell with the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet. If you need to add an alias, see this post.

Here is an example to remove a single alias from a distribution group with PowerShell:

Set-DistributionGroup "TestGroup" -EmailAddresses @{remove="[email protected]"}

Fill the form below and copy the generated the PowerShell code:

You will be prompted for your Office 365 credentials and your session will be established and the email address will be removed from the distribution group.

Send as alias in Office 365 using Outlook 2016

September 22, 2013 by Paulie 44 Comments

Although it is possible to assign many email aliases to a single account in Office 365 it is not easy to send as an alias using Outlook when composing a new email.

There are two workarounds to this, the first is to use a distribution group and assign users permissions to send from that distribution group. The second, which is the method documented in this post is to set-up a second mail account within Outlook and use the account to send mail via the Office 365 SMTP servers. This will give you the ability to select the alias using the “From” button when composing a new email.

How to setup Outlook to send from an alias in Office 365

The idea behind this method is to setup a second account in Outlook that will allow sending from an alias that has been defined in Office 365. It would be better if the ability to send as an alias was native to Outlook/Office 365, but it isn’t. See these instructions for how to add an alias with Powershell.

Before you can proceed, you need to find your SMTP settings: To do this, login to Outlook Web App, click on the little cog in the top right of the screen to bring up the options menu and click on options.

Login to Outlook Web App
Click the settings cog in the top right corner
In the search box at the top of the settings window, type in “pop”:
Click on POP and IMAP
This will show you the settings you need for POP, IMAP and SMTP access. We only need the SMTP setting:

I expect your settings will be the same as mine, which means your Office 365 SMTP Server will be smtp.office365.com. Before proceeding ensure you have added the alias that you want to send from to your Office 365 account.

Setup Outlook 2016 to send from an email alias

1. Go to “File” and then “Account Settings”. Click the “Account settings” button and choose “Account Settings”:
2. This will bring up the list of your accounts, click new:
3. Recent versions of Outlook 2016 may show a “Simplified Account Creation Screen”, which makes this process much more difficult:
4. If you see the above screen, follow these instructions to disable simple account creation
5. On the account Setup screen, select “Manual setup or additional server types”
6. On the next screen choose “POP or IMAP” and then press “Next”.
  - “Your name” is the display name that will be presented to the recipient.
  - “Email address” is the email alias that you added to your account in Office 365.
  - Account Type should be POP3.
  - Incoming Mail Server “127.0.0.1”.
  - Outgoing mail server(SMTP) should be set to whatever your SMTP server was shown as in Outlook Web App, but probably smtp.office365.com
  - Username should be your actual Office 365 username, not an email alias.
  - Password should be set to your Office 365 Password.
  - Untick the option “Automatically test account settings when Next is clicked”
7. Now click on “More Settings …”
8. Click on the “Outgoing Server” Tab and then tick the box “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”.
9. Click on the “Advanced” tab and then change the “Outgoing Server (SMTP)” setting to 587 and the encryption type to “TLS”.
10. Click OK to return to the previous screen and then click next to add the account. On the next screen click finish.
11. When the account was created Outlook created a new PST file for the new account. We don’t need that as we are not going to be receiving any emails on this account. You should now be back at the E-Mail accounts screen. Click on your new account to highlight it and then click on “Change Folder” option.
12. Select your inbox from your main Exchange account. Click OK and then Close. The new PST file will still be in your folder list, but you can remove it by right clicking on it and choosing close.
13. Now your account is set-up and you will be able to send email from this address by simply selecting the from address when composing a new email.
14. Although you are now in a position to send emails using this address there is one additional step to ensure that Outlook does not attempt to receive email.Click on the “Send / Receive” tab and then click on “Define Send/Receive groups”In the Send/Receive Groups settings, click on “Edit”. Select your newly created account and untick the box which says “Include the selected account in this group”. Like the following picture:

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Outlook 2007 crashes when opening calendar view

September 5, 2013 by Paulie 17 Comments

I’ve had this problem on a couple of machines now, both were running Outlook 2007 SP3. Outlook appears to be working normally, but if you try to access the calender it just hangs and displays “not responding” in the title bar.

Eventually you are left with no choice but to close and restart Outlook. There seems to be several problems with this, and therefore several possible solutions.

Outlook 2007 Hangs when accessing the Calendar – useful command line switches

First, try the easy solution of starting Outlook with some command line switches, this procedure seemed to help on both machines but only fixed it on one. I used:

outlook /resettodobar /cleanprofile /cleanviews /cleandmrecords /cleanfreebusy

There are lots of command line options that you can apply to Outlook and they are all explained here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook-help/command-line-switches-for-microsoft-office-outlook-2007-HP001218589.aspx#BM4

Access to the calender in Outlook 2007 may be blocked by some existing tasks

It seems that the default calendar view also shows the task list, and I found the tasks to be where the problem originated from, and in both cases the tasks were incomplete and not correctly filled out.

Go into the tasks tab and list your outstanding tasks, you may see some entries that are entirely blank, you may be unable to click on them or access them at all, like this:

Not only was I unable to click on these tasks, but they were constantly refreshing like they could not be properly found.

Try changing the view so that you can get a more stable look at the remaining tasks:

By changing the view I was able to get a stable view of the remaining tasks. Deleting the rogue tasks, which were flagged as incomplete, but many years old solved the issue. The calendar became accessible again.

I spent quite a long time trying various fixes to this quite basic fault in Outlook, quite a few others have experienced almost the same problem as me, so hopefully this saves someone else some time.

Adding an email address alias to a distribution group in Office 365

September 2, 2013 by Paulie 6 Comments

This post covers how to add an alias address to a distribution group in Office 365 using Powershell. The email address is added by using the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet, but the PowerShell code you need will be created for you by filling out the form below:

Copy and paste the text above into a PowerShell Window and all the hard work will be done for you.

You will be prompted for your Office 365 credentials (make sure you enter credentials with permissions to edit the group) and then then your session will be established. You should get output similar to this:

Hope this helps 🙂

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