FermiMail: How to troubleshoot/resolve common FermiMail issues

Intended for:

FermiMail users.

Scenario/Use case:

Mailbox Issues
Email Client Issues
Listserv Issues
- I did not receive the attachment in an email message sent to a LISTSERV mailing list. Why?

Instructions:

Mailbox Issues

How do I block all spam?

Short answer: You cannot block all spam. Driven by profit or malicious intent, spammers are actively creating ways to circumvent anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-malware filters to get their content presented to you and evoke a response from you. While we employ several methods to filter spam and other undesirable content, some will always get through.

Why is valid email being sent to the Junk Email folder?

Called a false positive, the anti-spam filters may determine a legitimate email message to be spam and therefore place it in your Junk email folder. Spam includes emails seen as spoofed, malicious, unwanted, unsolicited or fraudulent.
The best way to avoid false positive scoring is to tune your personal Junk email filters in Outlook or Outlook on the web. A more detailed explanation of Junk Email filters is available in this document.

What is Clutter and how do I remove this feature?

Clutter is a feature in Exchange Online that sorts your incoming mail. When Clutter sees an item you're likely to ignore, it will move the item into the Clutter folder. You can continue using email as usual and Clutter will learn which messages aren't as important to you.
Email messages from the following senders will not be placed into your Clutter folder in Exchange:
- SharePoint/FermiPoint: Process workflow messages.
- FTL/Kronos: Timecard messages.
- FermiWorks/Workday: Employee/Management messages.
- Everbridge: Emergency messages.
From time to time Clutter may get it wrong. You can quickly scan the Clutter folder and move any messages that shouldn't be there back to your inbox. Clutter will learn from this and sort your mail accordingly.
If you want to remove the Clutter feature, it is easiest to remove it via your web client.
1. Sign in to Webmail https://fermimail.fnal.gov.
2. Click on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Select “Options.”
4. On the left-hand side navigation, under “Mail,” select “Clutter.”
5. Uncheck the box marked “Separate items identified as clutter.”
6. Click Save.

How do I change the organizer of a recurring meeting?

You cannot change the organizer of a recurring meeting. To change the meeting organizer:
1. End the recurring meeting by setting an end date and send a meeting update to all attendees.
2. The new organizer can then create a new recurring meeting.
Changing the organizer of a meeting is like changing the sender of an email message after it has been sent and then trying to find all the logs and related data records scattered throughout the system to change the sender's identity - essentially it cannot be done and attempts to do so lead to data corruption and inconsistent data records.
Please refer to the following Microsoft article.

Why is email being rejected because the headers are too large?

Email messages to some external email recipients are rejected with a Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 552 5.6.0 Headers too large (32768 max).
Email RFC's 822, then 2822, then 5322 do not specify a maximum header size so the recipient's limit of 32768 characters is both common in many systems as a default setting, but is also completely arbitrary.
As email messages pass through multiple email systems on the Internet from source to destination, each system adds information to the message header. If there are a large number of intermediate systems or if the systems are verbose, the email header size can exceed the artificial limit imposed by some systems, causing the message to be rejected.
There is nothing we can do to limit the growth of a message header once the message leaves the FermiMail system as it passes through other, external systems on the way to the destination.
A more detailed explanation of this issue is available in this document.

I think I am missing email messages. Where can I find them?

If you believe your emails are lost, there are four areas to check: Junk, Inbox Rules, Clutter and Archives.
First, check the “junk” folder, which should be in the left pane. This is a folder in which detected Spam will be automatically filed. If you do not find the emails you are looking for there, follow the instructions below for checking your inbox rules, clutter folder and archives.
Check your Inbox rules; a rule could be causing your mail to be moved somewhere you don’t expect.
1. Sign in to Webmail at https://fermimail.fnal.gov.
2. Click on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Select “Options.”
4. In Options, select "Organize email" and "Inbox rules."
5. If there is a rule you do not want, select the rule and click "edit" to change the conditions of the rule or select "delete" to remove the rule completely.

Email Client Issues

How do I check what is being Archived?

Right-click on the folder in question and select “Assign Policy”.
Make sure that “Retention Policy” is set to “Never Delete (Never)”.
“Archive Policy” determines when mail in that folder moves to the archive.

Pine is giving me a size error whenever I try to save a file locally.

You must be running Pine version 4.64 or later.

How do I get Thunderbird to work with the Global Address List (GAL)?

Please note that Thunderbird is an unsupported mail client.
Thunderbird users have reported that the EWS plug-in that allows for GAL to be enabled and for calendar integration does appear to work with Exchange Online.

Thunderbird seems to be running slower. The status bar takes a long time to disappear when I hit “Send.”

Most mail clients place this activity in the background to allow the user to keep working. To do this for Thunderbird do the following:
1. Go to "Tools," then "Options," then "Options" again.
2. Click the icon that says "Advanced." Click Config Editor….
3. On warning prompt, click I’ll be careful, I promise.
4. In the editor window, type in mailnews.sendinbackground into search field.
5. Right-click on the mailnews.sendinbackground field. Select "Toggle" from the context menu.
6. Close editor and options windows. Restart Thunderbird for change to take effect.
These instructions have been tested and verified on Thunderbird version 38.2

Why does my email show parts of a web page whenever an email contains a URL?

This is a new feature of Exchange Online called “add-ins”. Different “add-ins” can be selectively turned on and off by the user. Here is an example of how to turn off “Bing Maps”.
For Windows:
1. In Outlook, click File then “Manage Add-ins.”
2. A browser window opens and you can untick “Bing Maps.”
For Mac:
1. Click “Manage Add-Ins” in the upper right-hand corner of an email message.

Alpine is reporting issues downloading attachments, how to fix this problem?

Although Alpine is not supported by FermiMail, we have found a possible fix for the attachment size errors that are reported. If you enable the "Prevent Partial Fetching" configuration item, then email messages should be downloaded without issue. You can read about the configuration setting at the University of Washington website http://www.washington.edu/alpine/tech-notes/config.html. Note: This will not work for Pine and there is no known fix for Pine.

When I send an email attachment to recipients outside Fermilab, they see a winmail.dat attachment they cannot read. How can I correct this?

This problem is often caused by a message being sent in rich text format, which uses a different method to handle attachments (a method that is NOT universally supported on different email systems). To avoid this problem, please ensure your email client isn't sending messages in Rich Text Format (RTF). If you still have the same problem after following the above instructions, please submit a Service Desk ticket.
- For Outlook 2010, please check your file format by following these instructions.
- For Mac Mail, please follow these steps to set the default format for all messages:
  - Click Mail > Preferences, and then click Composing.
  - In the "Message Format" dialog box, select the format "Plain Text".

Outlook keeps suggesting invalid email addresses when I begin typing an email address. How can I fix this?

Outlook keeps a history of email addresses you have used in the past (the nickname or automatic completion cache) which it will use to suggest matching email addresses based on the initial letters you type. However, this history can become corrupted or include incorrect entries if you have sent email to incorrect addresses in the past. You can remove individual entries from this list or clear the whole list by following instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287623. These steps will not remove any local contacts you have - these steps only affect the nickname cache that is used for suggesting matching addresses as you type an address.

Listserv Issues

I did not receive the attachment in an email message sent to a LISTSERV mailing list. Why?

This problem is caused by a configuration of that particular LISTSERV mailing list. To fix it, the owner of the mailing list can specify either "Language= EXCHANGE" or Language= idiom,EXCHANGE" for that mailing list. This setting enables LISTSERV to keep Microsoft Exchange attachments in email messages (the default is to remove them). Note that this only affects "application/ms-tnef" attachments only - LISTSERV does not strip WINMAIL.DAT attachments.

FermiMail: How to troubleshoot/resolve common FermiMail issues

FermiMail: How to troubleshoot/resolve common FermiMail issues

Intended for:

Scenario/Use case:

Instructions:

See Also: