Hi there!

We use Office365 / Exchange Online for our domain, so all bounces end up in a shared mailbox that can be accessed with Outlook or via IMAP.

I tried to configure Limesurvey to process the bounces, but every attempt results in the following error:
Well, I checked the settings over and over, they are definitely correct.
I even tested them in a mail client and copy&pasted to prevent typos.
Nothing changes.
The webserver logfiles don't show any errors.

Did anyone ever successfully configure IMAP access to Office 365 for bounce processing?
Does anyone have a suggestion for troubleshooting? I guess the imap server provided some sort of error message, so where would I find that?

By the way, limesurvey is hosted on my own server and is working just fine otherwise.

Thanks,

Christian

Did you try using the IMAP-protocol via a E-Mailclient (e.g Thunderbird) with that Exchangeaccount?
The POP3/IMAP/SMTP protocol ports and serverhost can be tricky with Office365.
What settings are you using?
Are you administrating the Office365 account?

Thanks jelo

Yes, I tried the settings in Thunderbird, just to make sure. And the credentials are definitely correct.
So the following should work, but doesn't:

Survey bounce email address: office@<domain>.com
Server type: IMAP
Server name and port: outlook.office365.com:993
User name: <user>@<domain.com>\office
Password: <the_password>
Encryption type: TLS

I tried SSL and none, POP with port 995, IMAP without port and encryption none, SSL and TLS.
The error messages differ, but no combination worked.

I tried the username without the \office.
office is the shared mailbox, so this would load the wrong (personal) mailbox, where no bounces would be found, but this also gives the error message below.

By the way, we are on version 2.72.3+171020

I find the whole setup rather strange. All bounce mails, no matter for which email go to one account?

So if you send an email, and the address is wrong, you won't get the bounce mail to your own email address, but it would end up in a shared folder, for anyone to access?

@holch: No, I think that's a misunderstanding.
The address we use as "from" address for all mails generated by limesurvey is "office@<domain>.com".
And of course the bounces are send to that address.

office@<domain>.com happens to be an Exchange Online shared mailbox, which doesn't have its own Exchange user account to use for authentication.
If you want to access that mailbox with IMAP, you have to use an authorized user to login and attach the shared mailbox name to it. Therefore the rather strange syntax for the username <user>@<domain>.com\office.

That's just defined that way by MS.

By the way, don't you think that using a shared mailbox to have a team (rather than an individual) working on responses is quite normal? I don't want to have a few hundred responses or bounces in my personal inbox...

That's why I have a dedicated mail account per LS installation or even survey. And it is just a normal IMAP account, with it's own user. So if someone wants to access it, they have to do it with the specific login and PW.

What happens when you configure your personal IMAP account just for testing? My suspicion is that this "weird" configuration is not supported by LS. At least check with a normal IMAP account with a dedicated users and PW and see what happens.

Well, of course I could configure a non-Office365 IMAP account for testing and I'm quite sure that it will work.
But I'm hesitant to consider Office 365 "weird". It works perfectly fine with any other IMAP mail client and I don't see why LS shouldn't.

By the way, I'm not necessarily looking for a perfect solution.
If someone knows a way to get more details on the issue (logfiles, debugging options), I would be happy.
Searched through the documentation but could not find anything to that regard...

I am not saying that Office365 is weird (despite it probably is... ).

What I am saying is that having to use the login of another account to access this specific shared account sounds weird to me. But I am no email server expert, so it might be common practice. To me it sounds "non standard" and thus it is prone to fail in LS, because LS probably only knows the most common standards.

What I meant was to use your own Office365 email account for your personal email and configure it, just to see what happens (only test purposes). If this works, it probably has to do with the specific setup of this office IMAP inbox. Just to rule out things.

Noo, Office 365 is not weird at all

Ok, now I understood you. But I did that test already, exactly the same error message.

OK, then it must be some kind of trouble between LS and Office 365.
I don't know Office 365, but I remember that if you want to use a Gmail-Account with LS (or any other external application) you had to change something in the configurations to allow this. Not sure if I recall right.

www.limesurvey.org/forum/can-i-do-this-w...ey/107506-smtp-gmail

So maybe there is something similar with Office 365 to prevent unauthorized use?

holch wrote: What I am saying is that having to use the login of another account to access this specific shared account sounds weird to me. But I am no email server expert

These shared mailbox in Exchange is not a complete email-account. You assign exchange users to these shared mailbox, which are then shown in your Outlook as an additional folder. When sending emails your real exchange account is used.
Customers use shared mailboxes since they don't have to pay for an additional user license , which would be needed for a "real" exchange account.

But back to the issue.
Thunderbird worked. I wonder what settings were used. Especially the SSL / TLS protocol can make the difference.
I had problems getting Office365 shared mailboxes access via IMAP/SMTP before.
Sometimes there was a temporary issue caused by Microsoft. Sometime the clients I used didn't used the protocols correctly.

Microsoft Office365 is offering SSL on IMAP and POP. Not TLS.So try IMAP with SSL. On SMTP you can use SSL or TLS.
You should ensure that the webserver is not blocking certain ports via a firewall. Somes mail communication is blocked by default.
You can enable the SMTP debug mode to get more details about the error.

holch wrote: I don't know Office 365, but I remember that if you want to use a Gmail-Account with LS (or any other external application) you had to change something in the configurations to allow this.

If Thunderbird can access via IMAP/POP3 and SMTP no additional settings have to be changed in Office365/Exchange.

jelo wrote:

holch wrote: I don't know Office 365, but I remember that if you want to use a Gmail-Account with LS (or any other external application) you had to change something in the configurations to allow this.

If Thunderbird can access via IMAP/POP3 and SMTP no additional settings have to be changed in Office365/Exchange.

As I said, not an expert on email and less so on Office 365. Just trying to rule out any eventual issue. Because with Gmail, even if you can use thunderbird just fine, web applications sometimes don't work, even if used with the same settings.