Many companies use the Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) as forwarders to resolve internet addresses.

Whilst performing some exhaustive troubleshooting on Office365 & Outlook slowness & connection issues, we have uncovered incorrect addresses being resolved for EMEA customers.

When using Office365 in EMEA, outlook.office365.com is a CNAME record that should always resolve to either emea-east.outlook.com, or emea-west.outlook.com. This means you access the servers closest to you, and don’t cross the Atlantic multiple times to get to your data.

 

I have seen multiple occurrences recently of Google’s servers resolving UK based clients to outlook-namwest.office365.com which causes mail opening times of between 3-8 seconds (depending on the message size) and a raft of other connection and disconnection issues.

I recommend not using Google’s name servers if you’re either using Office365 or rely on accurate name resolution, but either OpenDNS or the servers provided by your ISP.

I’ll shortly post a powershell script in the downloads section that will send an email if any of your nameservers return a non-emea result.

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