Insane response from Microsoft support
Posted by SurfeitedSysadmin@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 28 comments
Long story short; we have a widespread issue with Outlook users regularly being unable to send replies from Microsoft 365 Group mailboxes. When the issue occurs, they'll click reply, write their response, and click send, then their draft will vanish into thin air and they'll get an error stating, "This message can't be sent because it no longer exists. It can only be discarded."
We spent about a month working with Microsoft support on this, providing them with repeated screenshots, recordings, network traces, etc, then eventually they came back saying the internal product team had applied a "global fix", and asked us to confirm if the situation had improved.
Some users I spoke to said that yes, the problem appeared to have cleared up for them, but others complained that they had seen no change and were still encountering the same issues with the same frequency, so we reported that to Microsoft support.
Off they went to investigate again, but before long they were back with another update...
The issue we are experiencing is... wait for it... BY DESIGN.
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft claims that it's "by design" to be randomly unable to reply to emails from a Group mailbox!
I mean, putting aside how laughable it is to suggest that data loss and emails failing to send is intentional, if this were truly by design, then it would happen all the time; not just randomly 30-50% of the time, because why on earth would you design something to fail intermittently?!
Anyway, they finished off by saying they would be closing the case, but also that it was on their roadmap to make improvements in this area, so I asked if they could at least link me to a roadmap item where I could monitor their progress, and they sent me this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?searchterms=group+issue
Fantastic! Thanks for nothing!
At this point, I just give up.
/rant
BoltActionRifleman@reddit
I’d always heard the statement “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” bandied around as a joke, never thought I’d see the day it was actually used sincerely.
So0ver1t83@reddit
I work with a non-profit; the group email support has been abysmal. You get what you pay for in our case, I guess, but I wouldn't think that would be all that "high level" of a service to provide.
wrootlt@reddit
Most of the time it is not actually "MS support", but some third party contractor firm from India doing their tickets. They have checklist. And now they also have Copilot to ask and paste the output without reading through or understanding. And Copilot is laughably bad about MS technology. At least in my 6-8 past experience and comparing it to Google AI mode. Like, all the time telling me wrong stuff about license requirements, citing a few years old documentation and suggesting deprecated features and cmdlets.
SurfeitedSysadmin@reddit (OP)
Oh, don't get me started on the AI, please!
With my most recent ticket about a different issue in M365 Groups, the first two responses were extremely lengthy, AI-generated slop, giving me suggestions to try features that don't exist in Groups, and change options via the ribbon that are actually only configurable 3-levels deep in the settings dialog.
The best one was where the guy sending me this shit didn't even bother to remove the following from the bottom of the email:
Thanks for choosing Microoft!
Yes, that's a verbatim copy+paste from his email...
LetsSeeSomeKitties@reddit
I have been experiencing this issue too.
The workaround I found, for now, is to pop-out the reply into a new window. It always seems to send correctly if I do that.
SurfeitedSysadmin@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the suggestion but I already asked a user to try that last week and unfortunately it didn't make any difference in their case.
The one thing it did help with was not losing the draft when the send fails, because when you pop out the reply, the new window actually has a "File > Save draft" option that doesn't exist anywhere else, and if you do that before sending, you force it to save a fully up-to-date copy that usually sends ok on a second attempt.
MasculineAardvark@reddit
this is peak microsoft support theater. they spend a month investigating, declare it "by design" when that makes zero sense, then casually mention it's on a roadmap somewhere in the void. the roadmap link is just insulting, like they're technically answering your question while knowing full well you won't find anything useful.
the intermittent failure thing is the real kicker though. if something is truly by design it should be consistent. what they're actually saying is "we don't know what's causing this but we're tired of looking into it." i've been in enough support tickets to recognize that move. at least with on-prem exchange when something broke it stayed broken and you could actually troubleshoot it.
GameTheory27@reddit
you should open a new ticket complaining that sometimes email works, when it was designed not to work. /s
SurfeitedSysadmin@reddit (OP)
Haha, that gave me chuckle! Thanks!
MasculineAardvark@reddit
at this point that might actually work, just frame it as "inconsistent with documented behavior" and watch them spiral trying to explain why their design choice only fails half the time.
fuzzyfrank@reddit
Yep, had this exact same playbook happen to us last year with some Purview/DLP stuff. I finally got them to acknowledge I had found a bug, but then they handwaved it as getting patched next year... well it's June and it's still broken...
Elfalpha@reddit
That's almost exactly the first response Copilot has given me multiple times for Microsoft issues that it's not confident about. Only when pressured would it "change its mind" and offer troubleshooting advice. Given we know Microsoft heavily encourages the use of AI internally, I bet that a support worker banged your issue into Copilot, got that response, and closed the ticket with no further thought.
AniBMagal@reddit
"we are closing the ticket but will let you know when there's been a resolution".
What?
IdealParking4462@reddit
"By design" is such a common support cop-out from Microsoft.
apiqorn@reddit
“By design” is Microsoft-speak for “we have no idea and don’t want to touch it.”
The best part is when they say it’s by design and then also say it’s on the roadmap to be improved. So it’s intentionally broken but also needs fixing. Cool.
Honestly this is why so many people just tell users “don’t use Groups like that” and push shared mailboxes or something else instead. Not because it’s better, just because at least it fails in predictable ways.
ltobo123@reddit
Also may be "your tickets been open too long and it is impacting our metrics"
Standard_Text480@reddit
Microsoft Gaslight: New premium support tier powered by Co-Pilot
notarealaccount223@reddit
Side affects (or causes) include hallucinations and the needful.
thanatossassin@reddit
How about a hernia?
wwiybb@reddit
Na the needful will be part of the next E license
thanatossassin@reddit
"Dont say we never gave you anything for free!"
-Mircrosoft
Stryker1-1@reddit
Sounds like that's the scape goat they use any time they don't want to put any effort into addressing the system
trail-g62Bim@reddit
My last ticket with them was the same. Clear bug. Spend months "investigating." It's by design and we are closing the ticket.
Eastern-Sheep6969@reddit
Hey, I have had recently a very VERY similar issue with GWS stretching over ~2 months, all of them incidents seemingly were... random. Drafts vanishing happened mostly in user mailbox accounts tough. They've claimed last week that it's resolved and for now, it seems like it. I'll stay alert
debrisslide@reddit
this was the response I got when we were reporting an issue with Bookings pages constantly giving "bad request" error messages. they just don't care.
RealAnigai@reddit
Logging with MS is always the last hope for a fix. It's last because it's the least likely to work in my experience sadly.
bluegrassgazer@reddit
You got a response from Microsoft?
CuriousForTheUnkwon@reddit
I had similar issue with group mailboxes and microsoft support kept saying it is an internal issue. We recreated the issue multiple times and try to identify what it could be and nothing. Then Microsoft sent an update and now the mailbox worked. We called them and let them know that it worked after the update, and they were like yeah we sent that update because of that. Like dude, we have been struggling for a month with this issue, you told us it was internal, and now out of the sudden it was because of an updatem. I can't wait for Microsoft to be replaced for a better software tbh.