Whitelisting Domains in Office 365

In recent months, Microsoft Office 365 has been updating their spam filters to block a wide variety of spam. Improvements to fight spam is great, but it can encounter many false positives as it’s not an actual human checking the messages to see if they are spam. These updates are being preformed on the server level, and occasionally block contact form submissions from your website preventing them from even going into your junk folder. In order to combat this false positive, we’ve assembled a guide to show you how to ensure that you receive all your contact form submissions into your inbox.

As this is done on the server level – not on your mail application – this will require an Administrative account that can log into the Exchange Admin Center. If you are not sure who is the administrator of your Microsoft Office 365 account, by default it is the person who signed up for and purchased Microsoft 365 for your business.

Once you have logged into your account:

1. Click on the Mail Flow dropdown on the left hand menu and select Rules.
2. Add a new rule for Bypass Spam Filtering.
   
3. Name the rule anything you wish, and then from the Apply this rule if… drop downs, select The sender | domain is.
4. A window will appear asking for the domain(s) you wish to add in the Specify Domain field. This domain is often your domain. We also would recommend adding “lawfirmsites.com” and “lfspools.com” to the list of senders to ensure that you receive all communication from us as well.
   
5. Click Ok to exit the flyout window, and click Next.
6. For the rule settings, scroll down to the bottom and tick the Stop processing more rules checkbox and change the Match sender address in message to be Header or envelope. This ensures that the rule is processed even if your website is sending using the default WP Mail rules instead of an SMTP server.
   
7. Click Next and close out of the review page. It will take a moment to save the settings.
8. Notice that the rule is currently disabled. This is the default action for new rules, so we just need to enable it. Click on your new rule and tick the Enable or disable rule toggle. It will take a moment to fully activate, so please leave the window open until you see the status on the left update to be Enabled.
   

And that’s it! Any messages matching the new rule will now bypass the spam filters on the server side for all email accounts on your Office 365 account. If you were sent to this guide by our Support desk and are still not sure how to add the rule yourself, or aren’t sure what domains to add, feel free to ask us and we will assist in any way we can.