Tag: Anti-spam

Can’t Forward Emails From Office 365 Account 550 5.7.520 Access denied

Posted on | by WebLuke | Leave a Comment on Can’t Forward Emails From Office 365 Account 550 5.7.520 Access denied

In the past few months, Microsoft updated security settings by default that breaks the ability for users of Office 365 to use the feature of forwarding their emails to another external account. This was done with good intentions to help stop hackers from logging into an account and forwarding emails to their account so they could get the password reset messages without staying logged into the vulnerable account.

But there are real reasons people use forwarding of their mail to other addresses, and the security setting can be changed. It would be best if you questioned the users who do forward their email about it as they should keep their emails for the organization in that organization.

You may find that if you send an email to someone who uses the forwarding settings, Office 365 email sends you back a message with the following error.

Remote Server returned ‘550 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external forwarding. Please contact your administrator for further assistance. AS(7555)’

Microsoft did document this recently after the change took effect and caused many people problems, including me. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/external-email-forwarding?view=o365-worldwide

But let’s help you out with a quick and clean set of steps.

  1. Log in as an administrator at https://protection.office.com/
  2. On the left menu, select Threat management > Policy
  3. On the page under Policies, click on the Anti-spam link
  4. On the next page, click the drop-down the Outbound spam filter policy (always ON), then click Edit Policy
  5. On the pop-over, expand Automatic forwarding and chose from the drop-down On – Forwarding is enabled, then click Save
  6. You can now close that pop over, and the settings can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

I hope this helps. Keep in mind it may be better to change the user’s behavior to increase security, than change this setting.

I have also planned to document more of these fixes to problems as I figure them out with the rest of the Internet, so this may be one of a lot more to come of these help style posts.

Adblock This…

Posted on | by WebLuke | Leave a Comment on Adblock This…

2015-02-15 01_35_33-Cryptograms.org - HomeI really hate how sites that have lots of ads always try to guilt you if you block the ads you had no plan on ever looking at or clicking. Take the screen shot in this post, the site says they spend $20,000 on hosting. What that’s a crazy amount of money for a site is not main stream. What are they spending over $1,600 a month on most dedicated server hosting costs for a good server $200-400 a month that could handle anything this site could send to it.

OK so that is a lot of money for servers so this guy must be poor and not make any money. But look you can get a “Premium Ad Free” account with them for $0.11 per day, that adds up to a few cents over $40 per year. Doesn’t sound too bad right? Well if you look at their forms used for registration on the site there are 30,306 registered members. And if only say 25% of them are so into this site they pay the $40 a year to be a “Premium” member that is a nice $303,060 little lump of cash. Even at 10% your looking at $121,224 a year from such members.

Those calculations of well over $100,000 a year of income from premium members didn’t include money made from ads that almost everyone else dose not block and may click from time to time because they get tricked into clicking on ads when they though that the ad was part of the site. The money from ads can be quite large for a site with good amounts of traffic that this site seems to get based on users. My own site that I have 2 ads per page on gets on average 100 views a day gets me about $100 a year or every other year. I don’t push my ads, I don’t care if you block them, its cool to get a little extra money but that isn’t the content of the site.

I just get tired of people acting like because people block the ads, the trackers, the like buttons, the email list pop ups that they are some how ripping off or making it so the site can’t possibly survive if you don’t see the ads. If I am looking for something to buy I go looking for it, I don’t need some ad to tell me to buy it. The ads just confuse people most of the time, are not entirely relevant, and distracting from why I went to a site. So I will continue to block ads and I don’t care for one instance your site will not exist if you don’t get me to see your crappy ads.