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Steven Hayes's avatar
Steven Hayes
Copper Contributor
Aug 21, 2018

External Company replies 'On behalf of'

Hi Office365 Community,

 

I have a client with a really unusual issue. The client in question has sent out a number of meeting invites from their domain 'mycompany.com' and an external client with an entirely separate, unrelated domain (notmycompany.org) has responded to the invite with a message 'on behalf of' the original organiser. For example sally@mycompany.com received a response to her calendar invite from 'george@notmycompany.org on behalf of sally@mycompany.com'. Is this expected behaviour? I have not noticed this myself or with any other clients and I am wondering why this would be occurring.  I did not think it was possibly to act on behalf of a company outside of your own domain. Aside from general business these companies are in no way affiliated with one another so should not have the ability to act on behalf of each other. Is this something that should be raised with O365 support directly? The user is running Outlook 2016 for Mac and the client is up to date.

 

Thanks

  • I think this is just normal behavior in the following situation:

    1. User a@mycompany.com sends invitation to user a@notmycompany.org
    2. User a@notmycompany.org forwards the invitation to b@notmycompany.org which will be "sent by a@notmycompany.org on behalf of a@mycompany.com"
    3. User b@notmycompany.org accepts the invitation and a notification is sent to a@mycompany.com
    • Steven Hayes's avatar
      Steven Hayes
      Copper Contributor

      Thanks for your reply Nestori Syynimaa

       

      In this scenario the invite was not forwarded to another user rather the recipient responded directly to the organiser to say that they could not attend looking like this

      1. User a@mycompany.com sends invitation to user a@notmycompany.org
      2. User a@notmycompany.org responds to the invite from a@mycompany.com
      3. User a@mycompany.com receives response and it appears as so: "a@notmycompany.org on behalf of a@mycompany.com".

      I have tested this between office 365 clients internally and I could not replicate the issue. My client is concerned that this person has responded on behalf of herself and want's to verify that this cannot be replicated in any other way. But I cannot confirm this myself as I am unsure of the cause of the issue in the first place.

      • Nestori Syynimaa's avatar
        Nestori Syynimaa
        MVP

        Try to see from message trace where/how the response was delivered. You could also see the response email headers to track the mail delivery.

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