Email System Status May 20th

Summary: Emails sent through May 2nd are safe and always available through the Mymail web interface at https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/.  New mail is always available at https://outlook.office.com/. We will be changing the primary address for all accounts to baruch.cuny.edu soon, which should remedy most of  the issues described below. In the meantime, the Outlook web interface is a consistently reliable way to access old and new email if the Outlook clients are causing issues.

Priority = Faculty Email Support: We know the next two weeks are critical for faculty to send and receive email to and from students; to that end we want to recommend that Microsoft 365 mail accounts are always available on the web at https://outlook.office.com.  The web version is not only a fallback option for sending and receiving email, in many instances it can be your primary method for sending and receiving email on- or off-campus.  The Microsoft 365 Outlook web interface is much more fully-featured than our old Mymail system.  Also keep in mind that the old Outlook Web Access is still fully available for referring to any old email, calendars and contacts you might need to access at https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/. The links to the old and new accounts are posted on the Quick Links menu on the College’s web site. 

Changing primary email address in Microsoft 365 to Baruch.cuny.edu: Currently, may email addresses are displaying in the CUNY login format: firstname.lastname## @ login.cuny.baruch.edu. Please be assured that this only temporary and your email address has not changed. Your email address is still firstname.lastname @ Baruch.cuny.edu. The temporary setting of the Microsoft 365 email address away from Baruch.cuny.edu was done to allow both accounts to be visible in a single instance of Outlook for Windows.  However, it is causing other issues with sending and receiving email.  We will be setting all accounts email addresses in M365 to @baruch.cuny.edu shortly after the end of the semester.  You can also ask to have your address changed to @baruch.cuny.edu sooner if you have no need to access the old and new servers in Outlook for Windows in the same profile.  Changing the default mail address to @baruch.cuny.edu will necessitate making the Outlook for Windows profiles only use the Microsoft 365 account.  We are working on a process to do that for users automatically and will support users directly as necessary.

Old emails, calendars and contacts: Changing the default email address in the cloud to baruch.cuny.edu will change how you can access old email on the old server. We will be working with users and offices who may still need to have old email (and calendars and contacts) available in Microsoft 365 and will be providing guidance on migration of email later this summer. Access to old email that has not yet been migrated will be through https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/ for the time being. We are encouraging users to only connect their devices with the Outlook client and mobile apps only to the Microsoft 365 environment and if they have not migrated their email to use Mymail to search mail when needed at this time.

Resource Mailboxes:  Resource mailboxes, which are shared mailboxes used by administrative offices of the College, cannot receive mail from senders outside of the CUNY M365 environment when the @login.cuny.edu address is used. We must change the addresses associated with all resource accounts to the baruch.cuny.edu address as soon as possible. We will be providing guidance to users regarding this change in the next few days.

Resource mailbox users have noticed that the message folders show up automatically in their M365 profiles on Outlook for Windows, but they cannot send messages the same way as before—notably the messages do not show up in the “Sent” folder of the resource accounts.  Adding the resource account as a separate email address in the profile does work, but will cause duplicate folders to appear in your folder list.  We are investigating removing the auto-mapping of resource accounts and relying on adding the email addresses manually moving forward.  There are also complications if you have not moved the resource accounts and users of them to having their Baruch address as primary in M365.  Again, in all cases opening the mailbox in Outlook 365 Web allows you to use the boxes until the client configuration is finalized.

Calendar Migration: We are aware that meetings (calendar items with multiple attendees) migrated to M365 are not properly updating for all participants when the meeting organizer makes a change to the meeting. We are investigating the cause with CUNY and Microsoft, but it is likely that these issues will be resolved when we set the primary email address in M365 to baruch.cuny.edu. In some instances, a user may need to create a new calendar item in the M365 calendar for a meeting that needs to be changed and instruct the other invited participant(s) to remove the old event from the calendar manually.  We expect to understand more about this in the coming days.

Additional technical background:  The bulk of the challenges we are seeing with email at this point are around the Windows Outlook configuration.  The challenge is that the baruch.cuny.edu address exists both on our local server and on the Microsoft 365 CUNY tenant.  Different versions of Outlook try to find things first on Microsoft 365 (including Outlook 2019 and later) and make it challenging to access the old server and new system at the same time, or even to access the old server at all with the Windows Outlook Client.  

We are having other issues with some @login.cuny.edu user mailboxes not being able to receive messages from outside of the CUNY tenant, which are basically off-campus addresses.  This is the documented behavior for resource mailboxes (which is why we’re changing them back very soon) but for users is because of a configuration error that CUNY will fix for us.

We are still seeing other miscellaneous issues around delegation and rights assignments, especially to distribution lists and shared mailboxes.  We are working with CUNY to devise the best methods for moving forward.