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[165945] Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365

lavinrac
After the latest update my Outlook client could no longer access shared folders and accounts that utilize mapi. I had been trying to troubleshoot and found when trying to create a new Outlook profile it was pointing to my domain name and not the Office 365 server. I verified all my domain and DNS settings were correct. Now Microsoft has posted this message: A third party update to customer managed web servers may be causing connectivity issues when using the Outlook client to connect to Exchange Online Details A limited subset of customers have reported issues connecting to the Exchange Online service. Upon investigation, engineers identified that customers reporting the issue had recently updated their web servers that host their root domain which inappropriately enabled Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). This caused web servers to acknowledge auto-discover requests sent by the Outlook client subsequently preventing connectivity to the Exchange Online service. User Experience: Affected users are unable to connect to the Exchange Online service via the Outlook client. Outlook Web App (OWA) connectivity is not affected by this issue. Potential Workaround: Customers have reported that disabling IMAP and SMTP on the recently updated web servers remediates end-user impact by preventing the web server from acknowledging the auto-discover request.
I can not disable IMAP and SMTP globally on my server as other accounts need them, does anyone have any other possible solutions?

Comments

16 comments

Date Votes
  • lavinrac
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365 I also want to add that I have the followoing options disabled on my server: [LIST]
  • Proxy subdomain creation [?]
  • Thunderbird and Outlook autodiscover and autoconfig support (enables proxy subdomain and SRV record creation) And that I have manually checked to be sure there are not any incorrect entries in the DNS zone file.
    • 0
  • dmaher803
    EMail Autodiscover Nightmare A few weeks ago I noticed our on-premise Exchange setup wasn't properly autodiscovering. When Outlook attempts to autodiscover it tries "domain.com", then "autodiscover.domain.com" and finally it'll check for SRV records. Ours is set up on autodiscover.domain.com since domain.com is our web site. The problem arose when domain.com started responding to autodiscover requests. After a bit of research I found that our VPS host enabled Autodiscover on our CPanel. So I went under Tweaks/Domains and disabled it, but it still responds to autodiscover requests (even after a week, so it isn't DNS propagation). There are no records in the DNS at the cpanel host nor on our DNS that would point autodiscover to cpanel, but it still goes there and it still attempts to serve up autodiscover. I need to know how to get rid of this completely. I can't have domain.com repsonding to autodiscover requests at all. Is there a way to just delete the xml file?
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  • lavinrac
    Re: EMail Autodiscover Nightmare I am having a similar issue only with Office 365. My issue started after the latest WHM update. You can read what I found in the thread I opened: /http://forums.cpanel.net/f43/latest-whm-update-broke-outlook-connectivity-office-365-a-454422.html I hope someone can provide insight and/or a fix.
    0
  • dmaher803
    Re: EMail Autodiscover Nightmare That is/was pretty much my exact problem. Oddly enough, this morning everything seems to work. After a few days of issues it seems to have magically disappeared. Maybe my cpanel host ran a patch that I wasn't notified about. I'll have to look into it further.
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  • dbh1
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365 I am having the same issue. Also note that microsoft's remote connectivity analyzer says the site is set up properly. I can temporarily get autodiscover to work by shutting down the whole server while I am setting up a new outlook client, but that certainly isn't scale-able. This is a major problem. I presume that cPanel will point the finger at microsoft as microsoft is clearly pointing the finger at cpanel. But, at the end of the day, MSFT is bigger and less nimble so, ideally, cPanel will help us work around this. In my case I am hosting DNS at Cloudflare. Right at the cloudflare level i have autodiscover.domain.tld pointing to autodiscover.outlook.com and MX set to domain-tld.mail.protection.outlook.com. Of course the A record of domain.tld itself is pointing to the IP address of the WHM server. It appears that somehow Outlook's autodiscover tool is pulling the ip address of domain.tld instead of autodiscover.domain.tld first before failing back to autodiscover.domain.tld (like when I shutdown the server). Clearly something on the WHM server is answering something being sent to it. I assume the short-term fix is trying to find a way to turn off whatever that is on a per account basis. I also cannot shut down imap and pop for all accounts. But I could for 1 cpanel account if I had to.
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  • dbh1
    Re: EMail Autodiscover Nightmare @dmaher803, what version are you using? I am on WHM v11.48.0.12 which is the current release and still having the issue. I believe there is a newer bleeding edge version. Is that what you are using?
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  • OWSam
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365 We are also having the same issue. I have been dealing with Microsoft support on this, and they are working on a temp fix to force Outlook to bypass the WHM autodiscover by way of an XML file installed locally. We are on 11.47.9999.150 [COLOR="silver">- - - Updated - - - Also they have triple checked that our DNS settings are setup correctly.
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  • cPanelKenneth
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365
    ]We are also having the same issue. I have been dealing with Microsoft support on this, and they are working on a temp fix to force Outlook to bypass the WHM autodiscover by way of an XML file installed locally. We are on 11.47.9999.150 [COLOR="silver">- - - Updated - - - Also they have triple checked that our DNS settings are setup correctly.

    We issued a fix in 11.47.9999.150 that should have resolved the problem. Could you tell me which settings for Proxy Subdomains, and Auto Discovery, that are enabled or disabled in Tweak Settings? Thank you.
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  • lavinrac
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365 Kenneth, any ETA on when the fix will be released as stable? I have updated my server to the test/edge release of 11.47.9999.150 and it looks to have fixed the problem. I did have to setup my Outlook profile again as the mapi connections were still broken in the original one, but fixed when created new.
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  • JacobPerkins
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365
    ]Kenneth, any ETA on when the fix will be released as stable? I have updated my server to the test/edge release of 11.47.9999.150 and it looks to have fixed the problem. I did have to setup my Outlook profile again as the mapi connections were still broken in the original one, but fixed when created new.

    Hi, Case 165945 has already been merged with 11.48.0, and is currently in QA. While I can't give an exact ETA, I'd imagine this fix will be out this week or early next week.
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  • dbh1
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365
    ]Hi, Case 165945 has already been merged with 11.48.0, and is currently in QA. While I can't give an exact ETA, I'd imagine this fix will be out this week or early next week.

    I would like to thank cPanel for being on top of this. I put a support request in last night and it Melanie of cPanel logged in and fixed it within a few hours. I assume the fix will hold until the next stable release comes out, but I presume they incorporated the same into the bleeding edge release for those that don't want to mess with this themselves. For everyone's info, cPanel said the issue was with the following script alias in the apache configuration: cPs# grep -i 'scriptalias.*autodiscover' /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf ScriptAliasMatch ^/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi Note that after this is fixed, for some outlook clients you will need to go into the windows registry and clean out the autodiscover information else it won't know to really try again. I would back up the registry first then poke around current user/software/Microsoft/office/__/outlook/autodiscover. You may be able to delete the Redirectserver key there or it may be something else. I forget. Then consider a reboot. And then re-try. Good luck all! Thanks Melanie!!!!!
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  • OWSam
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365
    ]We issued a fix in 11.47.9999.150 that should have resolved the problem. Could you tell me which settings for Proxy Subdomains, and Auto Discovery, that are enabled or disabled in Tweak Settings? Thank you.

    Actually my mistake, we are on 11.48.0.12 I will try the fix posted by Melanie
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  • StreetSurfer
    Re: Latest WHM update broke Outlook connectivity to Office 365 We're on 11.48.0.12 as "release" and somehow borked all 365 customers... I found ScriptAliasMatch ^/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi in httpd conf = where do I go from here?
    0
  • Mindlash
    The following steps fixed my problem (local website, cloudflare, remote Office365) 1) Open /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf 2) Find and comment/remove these two lines (you may only have one as I did): ScriptAliasMatch ^/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi 3) Run: /usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update 4) Run: service httpd restart This is the full reply from cPanel on the issue, Please read it before performing the steps above. Thank you for contacting cPanel. I apologize for the inconvenience you're having, however, in cPanel 11.48.0.11 we implemented a fix (#160649) to an issue customers were having when using our implementation of AutoDiscover which added the following entries into the /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf: ScriptAliasMatch ^/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/autodiscover.cgi this is essentially causing issues with any domain that is using their own remote autodiscover setup (outlook mail server) as this is the first URL outlook loads. Our development team will be looking into a means of fixing this (#164749) in future versions in which you can monitor for it's fix at changelog.cpanel.net. In the mean time, you should be able to manually remove these entries from your httpd.conf and run: /usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update service httpd restart to immediately get them working - please note that anyone that previously had an issue that the recent fix rectified, will continue to have issues.
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  • joako
    Still broken... any plans to fix?
    0
  • cPanelMichael
    New Still broken... any plans to fix?

    Hello :) The case referenced in this thread has already been implemented. Could you elaborate on the specific problem you are experiencing at this time? Thank you.
    0

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