I've run into a bit of a snag with external email forwarding for shared mailboxes in M365. Starting Monday, the forwarding functionality suddenly stopped working, and I couldn't find any changes or issues reported by Microsoft. I managed to work around this by saving the external email address as a mail contact, which is something I hadn't done before. It feels odd since it was functioning perfectly fine without that step. Has anyone else experienced this issue? I'm open to feedback on whether I might have missed any best practices. As a side note, it seems like Microsoft is investigating this issue based on input from another user.
5 Answers
You might want to consider why you’re forwarding emails externally in the first place. Some organizations avoid this due to security risks. If it's related to a ticket system, I can see the necessity, but just make sure you have solid protections in place.
This situation has been going on for a bit, so it’s surprising that you only ran into it now. Maybe there’s something that changed internally or an overlooked update?
Did you check the track and trace for those failed emails? Sometimes they can provide clues. I noticed attempts usually show up there, but it sounds like you didn't see any signs of them being sent out from your end.
I heard about new restrictions on forwarding emails based on how many licensed users you have. It might have changed recently.
Quick note: by default, external forwarding is usually disabled. I remember a recent change rolling this back to enabled—might be worth checking your settings. Also, why the need for external forwarding? It's not typically standard protocol.
I had to enable it through the anti-spam policy specifically for those mailboxes. Other accounts still have it disabled. Just need to double-check everything tomorrow.
I regularly set up whitelisting for specific external forwards, like for helpdesk systems. Just be careful to keep the security tight.
Not unusual at all! We had to do that during our migrations as well. It’s a common workaround.