GFI Woes
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So we use GFI MAX MailProtection to filter all our incoming and outgoing e-mail, and GFI MAX MailArchive to archive said e-mail.
MailProtection keeps a log of all mail for the last 30 days, and is a really useful tool for checking if an e-mail someone was expecting really came through or not. The other day, I noticed that a mail that I had received from someone wasn't appearing in the log, although it was appearing in the archive.
This was a big worry, and I logged a support call with GFI. They looked into a bit and there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing over the period of a couple of weeks. Eventually they asked me to send the e-mail header, as EU privacy law apparently prevents them from looking at headers on their system. So I sent all this off.
After a few days I then get a reply to say that 30 days has now passed since the original e-mail was sent, and therefore the mail would have dropped off the log file and therefore they can't do anything. Case closed. Have a nice day.
I'm really pissed off. I generally use the mail delivery log to confirm whether or not we have received an e-mail. Most commonly, this is when a customer claims they e-mailed us an order, but we didn't receive it. We use the log to prove that we didn't receive it and the error was at the customer end. I feel I can no longer use this, as it appears we have had at least one e-mail that we received but didn't appear on the log.
This pushes us one step closer to Office 365.
/rant
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That's some seriously bad support service. I hear about this stuff a lot, support teams know that if they stall long enough the problem will be timed out in some way so they stall to try to force the issue
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I'm wondering - does MS offer this email tracking ability?
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Doesn't Waterford?
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for Office365 you would need 3rd party software.
@Carnival Boy Do you need some help with that? We have a Technical Support Account Manager and they are pretty good at digging into these issues and knocking heads for me from time to time. -
@Minion-Queen said:
for Office365 you would need 3rd party software.
@Carnival Boy Do you need some help with that? We have a Technical Support Account Manager and they are pretty good at digging into these issues and knocking heads for me from time to time.Such as .... Waterford?
Summoning @SarawithanH
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@Minion-Queen said:
for Office365 you would need 3rd party software.
@Carnival Boy Do you need some help with that? We have a Technical Support Account Manager and they are pretty good at digging into these issues and knocking heads for me from time to time.Oh, I assumed Office365 would offer some kind of logging. It seems the journalling features are pretty limited too? This is an area I will need to look into.
Many thanks for the offer of help, but I'll be fine.
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@Carnival-Boy they offer third party hooks for it, but require third party tools, sadly.
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Hellllooooo!
I hope everyone's day is going fantastically!
@Carnival-Boy, I am first off, I am really sorry for how poorly your customer experience was. I know first hand that is frustrating beyond belief, especially when you (or your company) is paying a good amount of money and can't seem to get issues resolved.
As far as Waterford's 3rd party archive for Office365, Microsoft does not allow us to access their servers and extract any information. Therefore, being able to actually have a log like what you had with GFI wouldn't be completely possible. We do have a very good reporting side to our software, which you would be able to go back and quickly see if the emails came into a specific mailbox, but it wouldn't be a log like what I assume is what you are currently having issues with.
Can you explain to me a little bit more about how the log works? Is it a generalized one for all mailboxes or do you have to go search by mailbox user?
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@SarawithanH thanks for jumping in!
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@SarawithanH thanks it helps to know what is out there.
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@SarawithanH said:
Can you explain to me a little bit more about how the log works? Is it a generalized one for all mailboxes or do you have to go search by mailbox user?
I can indeed.
You can do a wildcard search to search all mail, both incoming and outgoing. Here I'm searching for all e-mail with a sender domain of microsoft.com
This displays e-mail we've received, and indicates if it was filtered for spam or anything:
Generally, users will come to see me because a customer or vendor claims they sent an e-mail to us and we haven't received it. There are normally 5 possible reasons for this:
- The customer is lying.
- The customer has an error with their e-mail system.
- The e-mail was marked as spam.
- The user did receive it, but has lost it or accidentally deleted it without reading it.
- The customer misspelt the user's e-mail address.
Users might be sceptical about the reliability of our internal Exchange, but they're normally more confident that if GFI says we never received the e-mail, then we never received it, because I explain that GFI is a massive specialist company used by thousands of companies around the world. The credibility of their system is important to me.
For you O365 admins, is there anything you can do when a user has this type of query?
Do any of you use journalling in O365 and if so, how's that working out for you?
The other thing I use it for is proving that outgoing e-mail reached it's destination. So a user will come to see to say that a customer or vendor has complained that they never received an e-mail we sent. I search the logs, find the e-mail and view the log record which will give me a 250 Message Queued log, which proves the e-mail reached it's destination server. What happened to it after that is beyond my control. I presume this type of query in O365 is fairly simple?
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I want to know too...I hate dealing with the "I didn't get that email"
It's worse when they are replying from an overdue invoice notice that was sent from teh same program that sent all the previous emails that payment was due.
