Client Error An error occurred when creating the policy when creating a anti-spam inbound policy

Question

Would be nice if M365 showed you why it was failing. I am trying to create a new anti-spam inbound policy using a quarantine policy I created and get to the end and do create and it just says Client Error An error occurred when creating the policy. Please review your settings and try again.

Went through Quarantine notifications (end-user spam notifications) in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

I have users and tried with our standard and onmicrosoft.com domain together and separate.

Without it telling me where the issue is, I am not even sure where to start.

from: Microsoft 365 and Office / Defender / Unknown / Other

Answer 1

In case anyone else stumbles upon this and finds it helpful: I got this error today when creating a new anti-spam inbound policy because the description I was trying to add was too long. FYI the description limit is 256 characters.

The only reason I know this was the cause is because after I got the generic "An error occurred when creating the policy" message several times in a row, despite trying different options/settings, I created a test policy (successfully) and left it super blank/generic with the intention of trying to edit it after creation. When I went to edit the test policy and add the description, only then did it gave a different error about the description being too long.

Answer 2

Turns out after talking with someone a lot more experienced in Exchange, when you make the initial policy it takes up to a day to take effect so you have to wait till you can create the rest of the policy.

Answer 3

Hello Rcon4,

Many thanks for your response.

Glad to hear that this has been resolved on your end by turning off the standard protection. Thank you for sharing this with the community. Pretty sure it will help many other users who might face a similar situation as reference.

Have a great day.

Best Regards,

Ashraf.

Answer 4

Not sure if it was conflicting with the standard protection or there was something missing when creating the anti-spam policy, but after I turned off the below the error went away. I didn't really change anything in the anti-spam policy while creating it since most of the defaults were fine.

Answer 5

Hello Rcon4,

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community.

I understand that you are experiencing issues creating an Anti-spam inbound Policy.

Since this is happening directly through the portal with different admin accounts, I'd recommend raising a support request to the online technical support team to report this symptom through the O365 admin center. A support agent can further connect with you remotely, for further troubleshooting and involve the backend team if needed. Get support for Microsoft 365 for business -- Online support.

You may be asked for a network trace to further give more details and analyze the connection requests and error message when creating this policy. Steps to collect this can be found here. How to collect a network trace | Microsoft Learn. Kindly understand that we don’t have higher permissions to check and analyze these logs as public forum support.

Your patience and cooperation are much appreciated.

Thank you for your precious time and have a great day.

Best Regards,

Ashraf.