Good, old, and fairly reliable components like email router tend to slip under the monitoring radar. They work for months on end and it comes as a surprise when they stop and, in a lot of cases, we discover the problem only because users start complaining.

For quite some time Dynamics CRM 2015 Email Router ruled the day – it worked fine with CRM Online, CRM 2013, CRM 2015, and CRM 2016. We used one instance for a number of customers and forgot all about it. Until one of CRM Online customer got their organization updated to, uhm, Update 1, and users started to see infamous “You’ve got pending email” box when logging in. Apparently, that’s where the line for forward(backward?) compatibility was drawn, as we had our server log filled with:

“#23379 – Could not verify the version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at https://disco.crm5.dynamics.com/noneofyourbusiness. The Email Router service that is installed is not a supported version. The Email Router version is earlier then expected by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server at https://disco.crm5.dynamics.com/noneofyourbusiness.”

As one would expect, update to the latest release, i.e. 2016 + Update 0.1 took care of the issue but the lesson learned:

When CRM Online customers have their instances scheduled for updates, mark these days in your calendar

Think about dependencies, external components, service integrations and be ready on the day. Better yet, have a sandbox organization provisioned and test the upgrade. And don’t leave components behind even if we are working fine because one day they will surprise you.