Until recently, users of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) had to open a support ticket to enable server side email forwarding. However, Microsoft released a set of PowerShell scripts in February 2011 which allows administrators who are comfortable with the command line to set this up on their own. Using the command line can be intimidating, but it isn’t that difficult if proper instructions are provided. Microsoft provides instructions and even a short screencast on how to do this but both leave out important steps. I’ll try to fill in the gaps in this post.
Note: Only BPOS administrators can perform this process. End users will not be able to set up forwarding using this method even on their own account.
1. If you are an administrator for your BPOS account then the first thing to do is download and install the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools. Even though you won’t be migrating any data, these tools install the BPOS scripts needed. There is a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of the tool available.
2. In order to have emails forwarded to an email address outside of your domain you must create a contact record using the destination email address. This can be done using the BPOS Administration Center by clicking “New contact” on the “Service Settings” tab.
If you are trying to forward emails to billgates@yahoo.com, that email address that must be specified in the contact form.
3. Open the Migration Command Shell from the Microsoft Online Services\Migration folder on your Start menu.
4. Execute the Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient command. You can use the syntax shown below or refer to this article for further detail.
Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient –DeliverToBoth $True –Identity <user> –AlternateRecipient <destination email> –Credential (Get-Credential)
If you open a generic PowerShell session instead of using the MOS Command Shell as shown in Step 3, you will get an error saying “The term ‘Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet….”
5. Upon successful completion, you will see a message stating that you “Successfully set alternate recipient for mailbox…”
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12 Responses to Setting Up Email Forwarding in BPOS
Does this really apply to Office 365?
So far I’ve been unable to connect the “MS Online Services Migration Tools” to Online Services (O365 in my case).
And I think this command may be more appropriate:
Set-Mailbox -Identity -ForwardingSmtpAddress -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true
Is Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient still relavent for O365?
I never got to a point where I could try to run it because my O365 credentials didn’t work for Migration Tools “Sign In”, but maybe there are some other settings I need to adjust for O365.
This process is for BPOS not Office 365. You don’t need PowerShell to setup forwarding in O365. You can do it right in Outlook Web Access.
Hi, is this supposed to work for multiple alternate recipients? Cheers. nick
The documentation doesn’t address specifying multiple alternate recipients concurrently but you can run the script multiple times to get the same result. Microsoft’s documentation is weak but I included a link below.
http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/f7494cd8-aee8-41ca-aa2b-f8a9286e6b2a.htm
How to know if email forwarding enabled for BPOS users using Powershell?
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-HK/onlineservicesadministrationcenter/thread/b16f9c98-887c-405b-8f85-7afdc40c9576
If you install message ops into AD users and computers:
http://www.messageops.com/software/messageops-mso-manager
You can see user details which shows current forwards.
coudnt work..it works fine for exchnge mail boxes but if you try to forward it to external such as yahoo, gmail, its not working..any advise?
Did you follow steps one and two of this blog?
i think it has solved my problem. Any idea when the BPOS will be migrated to Office 365?
Microsoft has been migrating BPOS users to Office 365 for several months now. If you’re still on BPOS and haven’t been contacted to migrate there might be something about the way your environment is configured that could be holding you back. For example, until Blackberry support was released in Office 365 customers who had BES set up were not being migrated.
Ted – any ideas on how to do conditional forwarding? if I receive an email from a specific addresss then forward it.
That’s a great question Randy. I’m not entirely sure but my guess is that you would need to set up a mail relay for that. I have never run across that exact question before but would be very surprised of BPOS supported that out of the box. Alternatively, you could easily set up a rule in Outlook to accommodate that type of capability. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.