26 gig Ost file

[callthatgirl]

@Sky-Knight that's what I tell clients doing halfies, pick one and without Office, it's always a band-aid with Outlook. MS is fair though allowing that awesome sync for gmail.com users lol.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@Sky-Knight that's what I tell clients doing halfies, pick one and without Office, it's always a band-aid with Outlook. MS is fair though allowing that awesome sync for gmail.com users lol.

I believe that's more effectively described as a "viral marketing strategy."

 

[callthatgirl]

No doubt they will force a 365 anything subscription, just waiting for that day to come.

 

[johnrobert]

I think I can reduce the number of emails I sync from Gmail as well by reducing the Folder Limit in IMAP to 1000 or 10,000 – is that correct? It looks like this then stops syncing Folders with more than 10,000 messages. – which is not what I want.

 

[Sky-Knight]

No doubt they will force a 365 anything subscription, just waiting for that day to come.

That day is already here. (Warning, off topic and a Rob shaped rabbit hole!)

The operating system doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just a platform. What really matters are the two ecosystems that drive modern business: Azure and Microsoft 365.

Azure is infrastructure as a service. It’s become the utility layer for business operations like electricity, but for compute. Microsoft 365 is the core of collaboration and communication. It’s where work happens.

No organization can avoid paying the Microsoft tax. Running your own infrastructure is too expensive, and no one has the leverage to justify it anymore. You still have options, but the smart money is moving toward Microsoft faster every day.

No company can function without collaboration software. AI is now part of that category. Microsoft already owns the compliant AI space before most of the market even realizes it needs to be there. Every day, more large enterprises adopt it as legal and compliance teams get involved.

Gemini? It’s already a niche product. LLaMA? It’s open source, and you can access it through Microsoft’s AI services anyway. OpenAI? Microsoft controls that organization entirely, despite all public pretense otherwise.

At this point, it’s nearly impossible to be in business without paying Microsoft something. And once that entry point is established, they have everything they need to expand across your entire digital environment.

Why? Because from an investment standpoint, it’s the smartest move. The money flows in that direction, and the rest of the market follows.

And anyone that would disrupt this? They're bought out long before they can become a threat. The EU doesn't like US tech companies for all sorts of reasons, AU isn't any more tolerant. The world at large is very right to be extremely cautious on all of this, because it's very much a monopoly. But it's also a monopoly that's grown beyond any nation's means to control. Microsoft is our government now in many ways, and if that's upsetting, I say good. We need options, and I'm out of them. Google and Apple are not in a position to solve this, and if you toss Amazon into the mix the four organizations are the only four companies really growing in the US right now. This also... scares me. Oh I forgot nVidia... can't leave them out. The Taiwanese company that pretends it's a US company and we just sort of claim them as such.

 

[callthatgirl]

@Sky-Knight most of my billable time is explaining and helping clients through accounts/security hoops and loops. No kidding.

That's why I feel confident I'll have a business thriving in 2029 eol Outlook Classic.

Also once again, a thread is hijacked to off comment discussions lol

 

[Sky-Knight]

@Sky-Knight most of my billable time is explaining and helping clients through accounts/security hoops and loops. No kidding.

That's why I feel confident I'll have a business thriving in 2029 eol Outlook Classic.

Also once again, a thread is hijacked to off comment discussions lol

I think you now know why I focused my time on authentication specifically about 8 years ago. Microsoft's authentication systems aren't complicated, but goodness they make a fine mess if you don't take the time to implement the correct recovery pathways. My daughter just ran into this with her college account. All M365 that school, the challenge? Their MFA registration campaign is default... which enrolls push notifications, but no personal email, or cell phone number. So when she broke her phone, she was left with no way to login until she could get to IT and have them fix it. They used a TAP, which tells me they took the time to configure Azure's authentication systems, later on I was able to see through her account they indeed enabled every MFA option under the sun the platform provides. But they forgot to update the blasted registration campaign so self service password reset can work!

I can't even be upset about this because my teams do it to customers ALL THE TIME. It's become a bit of a soap box, and I'll keep preaching on it until everyone gets it. Account lockouts are completely avoidable in the professional space, the platform is reasonable enough for most people to understand. but it doesn't function that way BY DEFAULT, and it never will due to compliance. So it's up to us to fix it, one organization at a time.

That's why I'm rabbit holing here, because you can't use Outlook without being able to authenticate. Doesn't matter HOW you're using it, you can't auth you simply aren't. And yes, that's most of the challenges these days! Simply getting logged in!

 

[britechguy]

So it's up to us to fix it, one organization at a time.

Does any specific, focused resource exist that discusses what's necessary to achieve the end you're talking about, and that includes specific "real world" examples?

If not, creating one would be a great contribuion to the cause. If so, promoting the one(s) that do a good job of showing "how to" is a good idea.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Does any specific, focused resource exist that discusses what's necessary to achieve the end you're talking about, and that includes specific "real world" examples?

If not, creating one would be a great contribuion to the cause. If so, promoting the one(s) that do a good job of showing "how to" is a good idea.

The Conditional Access Policy blade in the Azure Portal, has a create new policy from templates button. Click that, flip to the Zero Trust tab do the top row, and the first one on the bottom.

That will give you a solid basic Conditional Access policy structure, that's basically Security Defaults but corrected.

Then you jump to the password reset blade, managed -> Properties, make sure self service password reset enabled is set to all. Jump down to registration, make sure you have Require users to register when signing in is set to yes.

Now... this is the goofy part today, October 16th, 2025. Jump up to the Authentication Methods blade, and make darned sure you TOUCH NOTHING but set the number of methods required to reset. THE ONLY OTHER ITEM ON THIS SCREEN THAT IS VALID is the "Security Questions" option at the bottom.

Now... we're going to a new blade here. The Authentication Methods blade in the Azure admin panel is not to be confused with the Authentication Methods option under Password Reset!

Finally, Authentication Methods blade, turn on every single authentication method. EXCEPT (Hardware OATH tokens (Preview), Certificate-based Authentication, and QR Code)

At this point, you've configured what I refer to as the MFA Baseline.

Now while you're in the Authentication Methods blade, jump to Registration Campaign, configure it however you'd like.

The system will now bug users to enroll the things they need. And to do a password reset, they need any TWO of the authentication methods configured to do so. Or One... if you set it to one... which I do not recommend. I also do not like security questions. But people have to do what they need.