Why your mail forwarding might be broken, and you may not even know it.

Hi, again. Time for another story in the vein of Technology is Ruining Everything and Why Can’t Things Just Be the Way They Were and Get These Kids Off My Lawn.

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there.

Let’s start again. If you forward your mail to another site (like Gmail, Yahoo , AOL , or some other facility), this message is for you. If you don’t, this really doesn’t apply to you, but you can read along for bonus points and extra credit.

This is another part of the DMARC saga I told you about a few weeks ago. Now, this first part is very important, at least in the CYA department for myself: none of this is under my control, and indeed none of it is under Argonne’s control. We aren’t doing this to you, the internet is. Blame them. They’re horrible, the whole lot of them.

Okay, now that the blame’s been set, here’s the issue. If you forward your mail somewhere else, it may be silently not arriving, and neither you nor the sender may know it’s happening. That’s very frustrating, and I would fix it if I could. Oh wait, I *can*! Or, at least, I can tell you how to get around it.

First, and this is the easy part, stop forwarding your mail. Like, seriously, stop. Forwarding is something that gets broken by anti-spam and anti-forgery methods, and those are becoming more common. If you remember from the previous lesson, when mail arrives with a From: address of one site, but is coming from another unauthorized site, many servers will simply reject it – this is what happens when you forward mail. It’s happening now, and it’s happening more frequently. If you forward your mail to gmail, and someone from lanl.gov sends you mail, chances are very good it won’t arrive. (If you have examples of this working, please let me know, I want to learn from it.)

Okay, so if you’re going to stop forwarding your mail, where do you do that? Well, there are a few places to look.

• You can login to your Office365 account and see if you have any forwarding rules set up there. Here’s a shortcut to that page: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/?realm=anl.gov&path=/options/inboxrules
• You can look at the Argonne alias system: https://apps.inside.anl.gov/email_alias/ (onsite only)
• If you have an MCS account, you can check your mcs.anl.gov, alcf.anl.gov, or cels.anl.gov forwarding: https://accounts.mcs.anl.gov (Under “Account Information”, “Configure Email”)

In Office365, you should remove any “Redirection” rules. If you want, you can change them to “Forward”, but that will wrap the message up as a forward, the same way when you forward a mail from your inbox to someone — it’ll be from you.

In the other situations, it should forward to @anlmail.anl.gov which will put it in your Office365 account.

I or my team can help with any of this.

Alright, but now you can’t get your mail at Gmail (or AOL ), right? Well, you can. I don’t recommend taking your mail offsite, and in fact strongly encourage you not to, but If you insist on it, here’s how you’ll want to go about it. I’m only giving instructions for Gmail. If you’re using something else, hopefully these instructions will help you in some way. Or you can print them and use them to line a bird cage. You do you.

You’ll need to configure Gmail to pull mail from your ANL account instead. EDIT 2020-05-15: Since MFA, this method will not work.

• First, unclutter your Inbox in Office365. If you don’t, Gmail’s going to try to get everything in it. Make a folder, move everything old you don’t need transferred into the new folder, and have a nice (fairly) clean inbox in Office365 before proceeding.
• In Gmail, go into Settings, Accounts and Import, then “Check Mail from Other Accounts” and click “Add a Mail Account” * Enter your “@anl.gov” address, and click Next.
• Choose “Import my mail from my other account (POP3) and click Next.
• Make sure “Leave a copy” and “Use SSL” is checked, enter your password, and “Add Account”. * To properly send mail, in “Send Mail As”, add an address.
• Enter your name and email (use your @anl.gov address), and go to Next Step
• Use “smtp.office365.com” (port 587) as the server, use your @anl.gov address as the user, and use your password. TLS is recommended and should be checked. It may ask you to confirm you are who you say you are via a mailed link.

Once that’s done, mail sent to your ANL account will *also* go to your gmail account. It won’t be instant – there may be a few minutes delay. If you’re expecting something right away and need it right away, login to O365 and get it there. Also, everything you send will properly have your @anl.gov address, will pass SPK/DKIM tests, and you’ll have a copy in the sent-mail folder of your O365 account.

Now, you don’t *have* to do any of this. But if you don’t, like I said, you may start missing mail and not even know it. A few instances of helping people who weren’t getting mail they expected is what prompted this announcement. If you send a ticket complaining that mail isn’t arriving, the first thing we’re going to ask you is if you forward your mail. And if you say yes, we’ll make you wear a silly hat for a day before we help you.

Well, the team probably won’t. But I will.

Hope this helps. Have a good halloween, even if it does mean those kids are still on my lawn.

If you want to discuss this with us and your fellow CELS tech-users, use the tech-discuss @ cels list. https://lists.cels.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/tech-discuss. Thanks!