Mail Flow Guided Walkthrough

Here’s a sweet utility that Microsoft has provided for troubleshooting email in Office 365 – it’s a great starting place for investigating any email issues your end users might be experiencing.

Start by going to the Mail Flow Guided Walkthrough: Bookmark this page for future reference – you’re going to want to keep this one in your toolkit!

Let’s walk through a common scenario (Office 365 user unable to receive email from an external source) and see what this troubleshooter does for us…

1. Start by choosing the option that best describes your scenario:

2. Next step:

3. Next, how many users are affected:

4. Follow these steps! Each one of those plus signs expands to give you helpful instructions on how to achieve each troubleshooting step, and is really well laid out.

5. Sadly, our issue is not resolved, so we’re gonna just keep swimming:

6. The next step walks you through performing a mail trace to see what is happening to your missing email:

7. Based on the results of your trace, you can either report that your issue has been fixed, or not:

Or…

Now, I get that no tool can magically fix every problem – so I really like that Microsoft gives you a clear troubleshooting path to take to try and resolve your issues. And, if they’re not resolved by this troubleshooter, you can submit a service request, or post on the community forums. Even if you have to get more help, you now have a chain of your troubleshooting steps which Tech Support or the Community can use to help get you back up and running again.

This utility should definitely be part of every Office 365 admin’s toolkit!