Exchange Online

Microsoft is introducing a transport-based enforcement system in Exchange Online that will throttle and block emails from old Exchange Servers. The company explained that this change aims to encourage organizations to upgrade to a supported version of Exchange Server. Microsoft has found that thousands of on-premises customers are running outdated versions of Exchange Servers. The…

Microsoft has announced that it’s deprecating Remote PowerShell (RPS) for Exchange Online in new tenants next month. The company will begin blocking RPS connections for all new Exchange Online customers on April 1, 2023. “Today, we are announcing that starting April 1, 2023, we will start blocking RPS connections for all tenants created on or…

Microsoft has released a new update that brings improvements to the Message Recall functionality in Exchange Online. The company has announced that the cloud-based feature enables customers to recall read messages. The classic Message Recall feature enables users to retrieve unread emails from the mailboxes of the recipients. However, it doesn’t support recalling read messages…

Microsoft is once again reminding customers that it will permanently turn off Basic Authentication in Exchange Online in early January. The company is pushing organizations to adopt Modern Authentication (OAuth 2.0) as soon as possible. Three years ago, Microsoft announced its plans to deprecate Basic Authentication support in favor of secure user authentication techniques. Since…

Microsoft has introduced role-based access control (RBAC) support for applications in Exchange Online. The new security feature brings a new set of “resource-scoped permissions” to help organizations better protect access to email, contacts, and calendar data. The role-based access control model was first introduced in Exchange 2010 and it is used in Exchange Server and…

Microsoft started switching off Basic Authentication support for Exchange Online customers back in October. The company announced yesterday that it’s killing off Basic Authentication for the Autodiscover service on December 31, 2022. The Autodiscover protocol allows client applications to get the configuration data required to communicate with the Exchange Server. It’s used by Outlook, Exchange…

Microsoft has released cross-tenant migration capabilities for Exchange Online. The latest update brings new cross-tenant mailbox migration and cross-tenant OneDrive migration features for commercial customers. Specifically, the new features provide a faster and cost-effective solution to help organizations migrate user data between tenants. The cross-tenant mailbox migration feature lets IT admins move end users to…

The news that Microsoft is working on cloud signatures for Outlook for Windows is welcome. The venerable Outlook client has long stored its signature information in the system registry, which makes it hard to move signatures from PC to PC. On the other hand, OWA stores its signatures in mailboxes, so the same signature is used no matter where you log in. Of course, OWA is a simpler client (no profiles, for instance), but it should be eminently possible to store everything Outlook needs in the cloud. At least for Outlook clients connected to Exchange Online…

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Online and Outlook will soon synchronize email signatures across devices. Does this mean that the ISV market for email autosignature products is over? I don’t think so because there’s lots of other things to do with email signatures once device synchronization is handled.

Microsoft has released an advisory to warn Exchange Online users about increasing password spray attacks. The company has recommended enterprise customers to set up authentication policies to protect users and sensitive information in their organizations. Microsoft started disabling Basic Authentication support for Exchange Online customers on October 1, 2022. The legacy authentication method is being…