Wednesday 7 December 2016

AutoDiscover “Broken” in Outlook 2016

We have a client that has their services spread across a number of different cloud systems.

Recently, users had started “losing” their connection to their hosted Exchange mailbox with Outlook coughing up some really strange errors that were not very helpful.

We ran the gamut trying to figure things out since any calls to the hosted Exchange provider and eventually the company hosting their web site always came back with “There’s a problem with Outlook”.

Indeed.

What we’ve managed to figure out is that Outlook 2016 will _always_ run an AutoDiscover check even if we’re manually setting up the mailbox for _any_ Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) connection. It must be some sort of new “security” feature in Outlook 2016.

What does that mean?

It means that when something changes unbeknownst to us things break. :(

In this case the AutoDiscover setup in Outlook for EAS connections and the web host changing something on their end as things were working for a _long_ time before the recent problems. Or, a recent update to Outlook 2016 changed things on the AutoDiscover side that revealed what was happening on the www hosting side.

Okay, back to the problem at hand. This is the prompt we would get when setting up a new mailbox, or eventually all users started getting who already had mailbox connections:

image

Internet E-mail Name@Domain.com

Enter your user name and password for the following server:

Server: gator3146.hostgator.com

Well, our mailboxes are on a third party and not HostGator. So, on to chatting and eventually phoning them after opening a ticket with the Exchange host and hearing back that the problem was elsewhere.

Unfortunately, HostGator was not very helpful via chat or phone when we initially reached out. Outlook was always the problem they claimed.

So, we set up a test mailbox on the hosted Exchange platform and went to our handy Microsoft tool: Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer.

We selected the Outlook Autodiscover option and ran through the steps setting up the mailbox information, then the CAPTCHA a few times ;-), and received the following results:

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We now had concrete evidence that HostGator was not honouring the AutoDiscover.domain.com DNS setup we had for this domain which was not on their system.

A question was sent out to a fellow MVP on Exchange and their reply back was “HostGator had a URLReWrite rule in place for IIS/Apache that was grabbing the AutoDiscover polls from Outlook and sending them to their own servers.”

During that time we created the /AutoDiscover folder and put a test file in it. The problem still happened.

Okay, back on the phone with HostGator support. The first call had two “escalations” associated with it unfortunately with no results. A second call was made after seeing the MVP response with a specific request to HostGator: Delete the URLReWrite rule that was set up on this client’s site within the last month.

They could not do it. Nothing. Nada. Zippo. :(

So, for now our workaround was to move the DNS A record for @ (Domain.com) to the same IP as the hosted Exchange service’s AutoDiscover IP to at least get Outlook to fail on the initial domain poll.

Moral of the story?

We’re moving all of our client’s web properties off HostGator to a hosting company that will honour the setup we implement and use the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to test things out thoroughly.

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
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