[ms office - 2010] Strange issue with Outlook hijacking mail from externally hosted web mail...

[Koldov]

Please bear with me on this.... I know it's Friday afternoon!

 

Our school email comes with our LEA Learning Platform.

 

We sign on to it through that Learning Platform web ui.

 

Within that is an (Office 365 I think) icon and that takes us to our emails...

 

My Business Manager has a bit of a broken account as sometimes (quite often) that icon does not appear for him.

 

Trying to be clever, I though I would install Outlook from the office suite and have that just capture his mail.

 

I set that up for him and it worked... Was broken the next day... Then after a call to the helpdesk (in which they said nothing was wrong) it magically started working again...

 

Anyway, he decided to set up the school admin email within Outlook as well as his personal account.

 

The admin email although hosted by the LEA does not run through the Learning Platform, but uses O365 I think.

 

And here is where it gets weird....

 

We can sit there and have two screens open, one Outlook (running on his machine) and one in IE as the admin email O365 web ui.

 

I can send an email to the admin address and not only does it not even appear in the IE admin email O365 web ui, but it goes directly to Outlook sitting on his machine. Even worse, it does not go into the inbox set up for the admin email (which all settings look fine for), it goes into his personal email inbox!!!!

 

Does anybody know what might have gone wrong? Surely an instance of Outlook on a pc cannot hijack emails going to a O365 web account?

[ReadTheNetwork]

Long shot here but there's an option on Outlook to "leave a copy of the messages on the server". Check that this is ticked or not.

[mikkydoos]

If you use IMAP and not POP mail will stay on the server and be available and synced across multiple devices.

 

When POP mail is download into a mail client it is deleted from the server.

[Koldov]

Edit: Beaten to it! But yeah, what he says ^^^^^^^

 

Just had a quick look and that button isn't where it should be.

 

But I've found out why:

If the option to Leave a copy of the message on the server is missing in Outlook, it may be due to the type of email account you use. Of the most common types of email accounts, only POP3 accounts download the email to your computer.

 

If you have an IMAP, or HTTP (Gmail, Outlook.com etc.) account, mail is not generally stored on your computer. All email remains on the mail server until you delete it.

 

Thanks anyway!

Edited May 19, 2017 by Koldov

[ReadTheNetwork]

Does it appear in IE/web UI if outlook is closed? :/

[Koldov]

Does it appear in IE/web UI if outlook is closed? :/

 

I'm afraid not!

 

He is out of the office this week, so I just sent a test email from my account to the admin account (whilst I had the web portal open in a seperate browser).

 

Nothing appeared in the browser to say an email had been received.

 

The worst thing is that his 'PERSONAL' account out of office replied...

 

What is going on?!

[Koldov]

Long shot here but there's an option on Outlook to "leave a copy of the messages on the server". Check that this is ticked or not.

 

Actually, I think you nailed it here!

 

As is he off this week I have been able to sit down at his machine and go through the whole thing. Initially, his personal work email (accessed through the Learning Platform) was again not working and Outlook on his machine could not access the server either.

 

However, the problem wasn't in the Outlook settings running on his PC...

 

I got talking to the admin staff while looking through the various settings and it appears he had set up a multitude of forwarding and receipt rules! Now I knew this and had the access, I looked through them and a couple of them were a little counter-intuitive! Luckily I could log on to the Admin OWA through the browser.

 

So, the mail would be sent to the ADMIN account (the browser OWA) and it was here that there was a forward rule (and here the setting was to NOT leave messages on the server) to his personal work email account.

 

Take for example the voicemail from the phone system. Originally it is sent to the admin account, then forwarded to the personal work account and then on to a specific colleague who deals with them!

 

Somehow after taking out the worst offending rules and seperating things out a little, the personal work email seems to be working just fine!

 

Confusing! I'm still not entirely sure how it seemed to blocking things up to that account, but it appears it may have been a classic user error!

[ReadTheNetwork]

Bit of a trek for you! But congrats on finding it, annoying to find strange things happening.