outgoing email via office365

Aldo Cauchi Savona September 10, 2014

Hi, Is there anyone who is successfully using Office365 for outgoing emails?

We are experiencing issues sending the emails (incoming is fine) where a number of emails are rejected and then when the error queue is resubmitted they are successfully sent. We spoke to MS engineers, and their suggestion is as follows:

 

 


"The inbound  connector that we created doesn't interfere on the local settings of the Jira Application so you should speak with Jira developer to add new features like being able to set-up a 20 messages per minute limit, in order to send all the messages.

 Basically, it's something regarding the application that has to be changed."


Not exactly a solution... and i did not find an email limit solution.

 

Thanks,
Aldo

5 answers

2 votes
Norman Abramovitz
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September 10, 2014

Exchange online is fine.  It is just exchange online limits the number of emails per minute to detect spamming.   Push back at Microsoft if you have any pull. 

There are various other solutions to get around Microsoft's arrogance, but they would need to implemented by your IT department because you need to coordinate with Microsoft such as adding more email forwarding servers.

 

 

0 votes
Aldo Cauchi Savona September 11, 2014

From Microsoft:

{quote}

The fact is that the SMTP Relay settings in Office 365 can only send certain amounts of messages per minute and I don't have the rights to make such changes as adding more forwarding servers.

{quote}

 

Thanks for your 2nd suggestion. However to do that we would be paying for an additional server. Might as well pay for a Gmail account which we had before we migrated to office 365 and had no problems :)

 

 

Norman Abramovitz
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September 11, 2014

You can put an email server (service/daemon) on the same machine as Jira. You Jira instance would send the email to your local email service and the local email service then was configured to send to exchange. We installed postfix on the Linux box to accomplish this task. The email service can then deal with the retransmission instead of Jira. I am assuming you have your own installation of Jira and not cloud (ondemand) version. Physical cost is the time your IT person downloads, install and configure postfix. There might be some maintenance (upgrade, monitoring, etc), but we had no issues doing this for about 8 months. The answer from Microsoft is double speak. You can lookup the exchange server documentation and can see that there are settings to change the value. Do you really think really large companies can only send 20 messages per minute? The bottom line is your organization is not paying Microsoft enough to adjust their settings for you.

Aldo Cauchi Savona September 15, 2014

I checked their documentation and the limit is 30 per minute, even on the enterprise plan we are on (E3). The other option is to move to Exchange Server Online rather than Office 365, but will have to see the costs. Im against having an intermediate system to throttle the emails as it adds another possible point of failure. We are using a Windows Server environment and im not too eager about opensource email relays on windows.

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0 votes
Norman Abramovitz
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September 11, 2014

So, from your description, it sounds like you are directly sending your  email to Office 365 email server.   Assuming your IT group allows it, you can direct your emails to another email server that you can configure to send all email messages to the Office 365 email server.   Your forwarding email server could then be configured to 'limit' the rate of email being sent.  You should be seeing this issue with your other services that can generate batches of emails.

Your IT group needs to make sure the Microsoft side understands that this new email server belongs to your company.

If you are already directing your emails to an intermediate email server, then your IT group should be able to configure that email server to limit its rate.

 

 

0 votes
Aldo Cauchi Savona September 11, 2014

Thanks Norman.

We are not a massive company so im not sure if we have a lot of pull with them. I will suggest to them what you indicated above and see what they reply with,

0 votes
Aldo Cauchi Savona September 10, 2014

IT told me that we are using Exchange Online which might be part of the issue.

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