Important mail going to spam? Read this!

It happens to a lot of users. Your boss, colleague, or client asks if you've completed the first draft and you look at them with a blank face, with no clue as to what they are referring to. You either missed the email or it somehow landed in your spam folder which you rarely ever check. "Why is important email landing in my spam" you ask? Simple, you get Gmail to stop checking for spam - sort of.

If you're finding that wanted incoming email is landing in spam, here is a way to redirect it to your inbox. Filters are one of the most powerful tools integrated in Gmail. If you understand the power of email filters, you can do quite a lot with them to manage your inbox efficiently and productively. Follow these simple steps to setup a domain filter to automate "spam email" to redirect into your inbox.

1. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of your inbox and select Settings.

2. Select the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab and at the bottom select Create a new filter.

3. In the resulting popup, place this text (without quotes) “is:spam” into the "Has the Words box", enter the domain name from which wanted mail is landing in spam, and click Create filter with this search.

4. Check the Never send to Spam box (and any other boxes you'd like a match for) and click Create filter.

That's it! You've now created a filter to prevent wanted mail from that specific domain from going to your spam folder. Technically we haven't stopped Gmail from checking spam, but this filter functions in practically the same way, so no more scavenging through your spam folder to find that lost unread email. Next time you get an important email from that domain in spam, it will automatically pass along to your inbox as a regular piece of mail.

In our next post we'll cover why your sent mail may be going to your recipients spam folder and why having your domain's SPF and DKIM records up to date is crucial to having your email delivered appropriately. To learn more about how Gmail and other Google Apps can make your company more efficient and productive, be sure to contact our InterlockIT team! 

Gmail vs. Outlook - Which one?

We spend a significant amount of the day reading and replying to emails, so using the right email client is imperative for optimized productivity and efficiency. The most prominent and favoured email solutions to date are Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Outlook.

To decide which solution works best for your business, it's crucial to address the kinds of features and functions your users require. Outlook is generally the 'comfort zone' option for a lot of users, and has been for some time; it's a familiar and popular application. However, Gmail has been steadily growing in popularity (surpassing 1 billion active users in Q4 2015) and in our experience, it's taken the throne away from Outlook—but how? While Outlook and Gmail both offer a similar experience with basic send/receive functionality, Gmail has taken a step further with lightning-fast mailbox searching, integrated voice and multi-person video chat, and other productivity enhancements such as Priority Inbox. Furthermore, Gmail integrates Google Hangouts, the communication platform of choice of the next generation. Gmail also includes the ability to easily attach and link files stored in Google Drive. Google Apps Learning Center offers a great overview of Gmail and Google Apps.

Although the majority of Gmail 'converts' really enjoy it, we've come across users who prefer Google Apps but insist on using Outlook because of their familiarity with the old-school interface. Many users may struggle and even dislike the change to conversation view in Gmail, but once trained on the benefits, the majority find it really helps manage large volumes of emails without using time consuming methods like sorting by sender and filing in individuals folders. Placing Outlook on top of Gmail excludes users from many powerful Gmail features that can really boost productivity and efficiency. For example, Gmail can merge emails into a single "conversation," which makes it much easier to navigate messages compared to Outlook. This enables the user to view or hide any related correspondence with a simple mouse click, instead of having to shuffle through multiple messages from the same sender. Gmail also upgrades folders with labels, which means that one email can have as many labels as needed versus Outlook, which only understands folders so users can only file a single email in a single folder - how old school is that?! Despite being able to assign multiple tags to one email, once trained with tips to use Google's powerful email search capabilities, many users stop filing in folders and using labels altogether.

Having instant access to your email and files, along with seamless collaboration, is another big selling point for Google Apps. There is no need to download, install, update, and sync legacy applications like Outlook since Google handles all the related maintenance and automatically updates Gmail, so users always get the latest innovations. This way, when you click open your browser or pick up your tablet or smartphone, it just simply works.

One of the other powerful features of Gmail is it's advanced spam filtering system. Gmail offers superior spam filtering which acts like a funnel through which only legitimate mail can pass. By the time you step into your office in the morning, Google ensures that any email that was collectively marked spam by others across the world does not end up in your inbox. Neat!

Gmail spam filtering

Although Outlook offers a familiar interface, Gmail and Google Apps for Work remain the email service of choice for most of our customers. More than 5 million businesses worldwide have moved to Google Apps, allowing their employees to productively collaborate, wherever and whenever they work. Be sure to check out some of the differences and benefits you'll get by switching to Gmail from Outlook and a legacy Exchange ecosystem. We here at InterlockIT have led many migrations, so contact us to schedule yours!

Autodiscover and Outlook

We see lots of confusion in our customer base about the function that Autodiscover serves in both traditional on-premises environments and cloud-based environments alike. At a high level, Autodiscover basically allows you to skip all the back-end configuration work that legacy mail clients need and have the Outlook email client do it all for you.

In environments with Active Directory, getting Autodiscover to work properly can be more trouble than it should be, but with access to group policies and a bit of information, you'll be able to get it working.

What is Autodiscover?

Autodiscover is a service that runs in the background of your Exchange or Office 365 install and can automatically configure profile settings for users running Outlook 2007 or newer, Mac Mail, or mobile phones. It provides access to Exchange features for Outlook 2007 and up clients that are connected to your Exchange messaging environment, and it uses a user's email address and password to provide profile settings to supported clients and devices. If the Outlook client is joined to a domain, the user's domain account is used.

In earlier versions of Microsoft Exchange (2003 SP2 or earlier) and Outlook (2003 or earlier), you had to configure all user profiles manually to access Exchange; Autodiscover negates the need for this manual setup. Extra work was required to manage these profiles if changes occurred in the environment and if this maintenance stopped or fell behind schedule, Outlook clients could stop functioning entirely.

Autodiscover is a function of Exchange (and, in a roundabout way, therefore also a function of Office 365). Outlook clients are coded in such a way that they can take advantage of Autodiscover, but for this to work correctly, Outlook needs to be told where to "find" the Autodiscover information. The order of logic that Outlook uses when trying to retrieve information is:

• Service Connection Point (SCP) lookup – Outlook will get Autodiscover information from Active Directory. If this fails, Outlook begins its 'non-domain' connections;
• HTTPS root domain query;
• HTTPS Autodiscover domain query;
• HTTP redirect method;
• SRV record query;
• Local XML file;
• Cached URL in the Outlook profile (exclusive to Outlook 2013 and newer).

How does Autodiscover work?

When you install a Client Access Server in Exchange 2013, a default virtual directory named Autodiscover is created under the default website in Internet Information Services (IIS). This virtual directory handles Autodiscover service requests from supported clients under the following circumstances:

• When a user account is created or updated;
• When an Outlook client periodically checks for changes to the Exchange Web Services URLs;
• When underlying network connection changes occur in your Exchange environment.

Additionally, a new Active Directory object named the SCP is created on the server where you install the Client Access Server.

The SCP object contains the authoritative list of Autodiscover service URLs for the entirety of your Active Directory forest. (You can use the Set-ClientAccessServer cmdlet to update the SCP object.)

How to manually override Autodiscover service for your PC

Occasionally, Outlook clients can "find" incorrect Autodiscover settings – we find this is most common when businesses decide to switch to Office 365 from an on-premises Exchange environment. Here's how you can force Outlook to stop looking for Autodiscover

1. Click Start, and then click run
2. In the Run dialog box, type regedit, and then click OK
3. In the Registry Editor, go to the following registry key:
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Autodiscover
• Create a new DWORD (32-bit) string named "ExcludeScpLookup" and set its value to 1.

You can alternatively use the command prompt to exclude SCP lookups by using following commands:

reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Autodiscover /v

ExcludeScpLookup /t reg_dword /d 1 /f

Hopefully this has helped you get a better understanding of how Autodiscover works for Outlook as well as how to override default priorities.