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notesguru99's avatar
notesguru99
Brass Contributor
Feb 06, 2023

Rebrand forcing email address change - what are my options?

Hi All,

We are going through a rebrand and we will be branding ourselves with another company as the same business name, but we will both remain independent entities.

The proposal was put forward that we both change our email addresses over to newbrand.com for example, but because we are both independent firms, with separate IT systems I told them this was not possible and we would both need subtle differences in the new rebrand email domains newbrand1 and newbrand2.com for example.   Like I say, this is not a merger, we are 2 separate businesses but want to rebrand as looking like one entity.  My question then is am I right thinking we can't have the same domain name - I don't see how it will work with email routing etc and this will in effect change all of our logins for 365 too.  Any thoughts much appreciated.

  • Dan_Snape's avatar
    Dan_Snape
    Steel Contributor
    At this stage your thinking is correct if using Exchange Online. You can do this relatively simply using Exchange on-premises. The only way I see it working is if you have all mail for newbrand.com going to one of the tenants, and that tenant contains all mailboxes for one organisation, while all users from the other organisation are represented as mailusers with a target address of the mailboxes in the other tenant. The problem with this is that you will need to use some sort of address re-writing appliance so that users in the tenant that does not contain newbrand.com have from/reply-to addresses of newbrand.com. Not an ideal scenario. I'd personally recommend slightly different SMTP addresses that might still give the idea that both organisations are part of the same entity.
    • notesguru99's avatar
      notesguru99
      Brass Contributor
      Thanks Dan, you've reinforced my thinking on this, I just wanted to be sure.
      All the best
      Stuart
  • Hello,

    This feature is something that will come soon as per this documentation:
    https://practical365.com/microsoft-releasing-cross-tenant-domain-sharing-preview-for-exchange-online/

    If it's something that can't wait, from my perspective the solution will be to migrate the mailboxes from one tenant to the other one, ( cross tenant mailbox migration: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/cross-tenant-mailbox-migration?view=o365-worldwide ), and assign the required domains to the users. ( On source tenant there'll be still mail users with the old domain routing to the new mailboxes on target tenant ).
    Another solution could be create 2 separate domains, ( Domain1 and Domain2 ), and configure each one in the correct tenant with each correct DNS configuration.
    • notesguru99's avatar
      notesguru99
      Brass Contributor
      Many thanks for this info - I hope I can argue the case to wait until the cross-tenant domain sharing is available - thanks for the optional info too.
      Regards
      Stuart

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