I'm having a bit of a puzzling issue with Office365 and Avanan filtering in place. A specific sender's emails are ending up in the junk folder for one recipient in our organization, while everyone else receives them just fine. I've tried several troubleshooting steps: I checked the blocked senders list, added the sender to the safe senders list in Outlook, verified there were no rules set up in both Outlook and OWA, and looked into transport rules without finding anything out of the ordinary. Avanan confirmed that the emails are being delivered normally to the inbox. I even asked the user directly if they were doing this on purpose, and they denied it. What else could I be missing here?
5 Answers
We face similar issues all the time! Often, we just tell users to mark emails as 'not junk' to add them to the safe senders list, but it seems that hasn't worked in your case. Have you tried that with this specific user?
You might want to check the junk filtering settings in Outlook. We usually disable it because it tends to cause these kinds of issues. Run this command: Get-MailboxJunkEmailConfiguration -Identity . If it's on, consider turning it off, and also review the blocked senders list.
I checked, and they aren't caught in spam. The domain and sender are showing as trusted senders and domains.
Could there be a DMARC issue with the sender's domain set to quarantine? If you're unsure, you can analyze the email header using a tool like the one at learndmarc.com.
If that were the case, I think the emails would go to junk for everyone, not just this one person. The sender's emails go through to seven others without a hitch. But I'll check it out just in case.
I had a similar issue with a user who had inadvertently blocked the sender on their iPhone. It was causing those emails to end up in junk. If this user is checking their email on their phone, you might want to see if they've blocked that address there too.
That's an interesting angle! I will definitely ask them about their phone settings and have them remove it as a test for a couple of days.
Have you checked the mail flow? It can indicate why the email is getting filtered. Just a thought!
I did a message trace on those emails, and it confirms they are journaled, hit the Avanan whitelist, and are marked as successfully delivered to the inbox, yet they still land in junk.
Unfortunately, that hasn't solved the problem, and the client is understandably pressing for a proper solution.