Why Email Forwarding in Office 365 Doesn't Work Anymore (2024)

Update Note: This Jan/2021 article is being updated that email forwarding is now supported in Office 365 (as of Fall/2021) - See this Microsoft doc for more details...

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Users who forward emails out of their Office 365 account to another email system (like to Gmail) will (likely) have users tell them that their "emails are bouncing".Senders get message responses Undeliverable - "Your message wasn't delivered because the recipient's email provider rejected it."

Can the Office 365 Administrator Set a Policy to Allow Email Forwarding?

The organization can't just override email forwarding for a single user or group of users.By changing this "Outbound Spam Filter Policy," it opens up a companywide security hole for all users in the organization.There was a good reason Microsoft up and blocked email forwarding for ALL Office 365 tenants one day as email forwarding is a known event in security breaches. So just don't re-open this security hole and re-allow email forwarding for users no matter how much they scream and yell!

What Can Users Do To Replace Email Forwarding Functionality?

Users who were using email forwarding were likely doing so to consolidate multiple email accounts into a single inbox that they always use.So instead of having to check 10 email accounts, the user can have all emails forwarded to just ONE email account. That was a requirement a decade ago when email was kind of a 1 application / 1 mailbox thing, but these days, you can see ALL emails from MULTIPLE email systems consolidated into a single view at your client/application side.

Applications like Microsoft Outlook (Window and Mac), Apple's default MailApp on Macs and iOS, Anrdoid's default MailApp, Outlook for Mobile, etc all have build-in functionality that consolidate multiple inboxes into a single view.So you can connect multiple email accounts on your laptop, tablet, or phone and see a single view of ALL your messages without having to forward emails around!

What If We Have a Business Application / Requirement to Forward Emails?

Many organizations have generic email addresses (ie: sales@, helpdesk@, support@, etc) that receive emails that need to be forwarded to individual user email accounts for notification, so support ticket notifications go to several support engineers monitoring those notices.There ARE ways Office 365 provides forwarding of these messages without opening up the companywide security hole.

• Forwarding from a Specific Recipient:Office 365 allows for the creation of an anti-malware "Threat Management policy" that will allow for the forwarding of incoming messages from specific email address(es).So if a mailbox gets alerts from SAP or ServiceNow or some line of business application, the email address of the application "sender" (which typically is the same incoming email address every time) can be added in to allow those messages to be forwarded https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/configure-anti-malware-policies
• Email Forwarding Allowed with Group and Shared Mailboxes:Additionally, this new default behavior of Office 365 blocking email forwarding only applies to "user mailboxes".If the organization has group or shared mailboxes, email forwarding is still allowed.If a mailbox is currently a "user mailbox" that has forwarding rules that are being blocked, convert the user mailbox to a shared mailbox, and then forwarding rules will be allowed https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/email/convert-user-mailbox-to-shared-mailbox (obviously test this process on a test mailbox to confirm it works as expected before changing a critical business mailbox)

Summary

So the end result here is "email forwarding" for users is no longer a thing due to security reasons.But there are a number of ways to provide similar business functionality without having to open a security hole in your email environment.