Can 365 ignore internal domains when routing email?

Copper Contributor

Hi all,

 

This is a conundrum I've got concerning Users accessing 365 services whose email is provided by Google/G Suite. We currently have two primary groups of users.

 

Group A Users have their emails hosted by Office 365.

Group B Users have their emails hosted by G Suite.

 

Group A can currently access all service just fine as all services, including Email. If Group B is set up in the same manner as the above with the exception of email, any email sent internally between Group A and Group B fails as it is assumed that Group B's email is hosted by 365, and so doesn't reach them. Any email sent from any other domain, i.e. Yahoo, to Group B works perfectly.

 

I hope the above makes sense. I would appreciate any advice regarding this.

 

Thanks!

7 Replies
Which platform is the master in terms of e-mail: Google or Office 365? I guess Google, if so you have to have both Group of users in Google and configure e-mail redirection for the Group of users that is already in Office 365

Hi Juan,

 

Thanks for the response.

 

We're in between at the moment. Group A needs the benefits of being on Office 365, whilst B need the benefits of being on Google. Not the ideal situation to be in, but we're caught at the moment. It boils down to education needs.

 

From what you're saying though it sounds like it can't be done. I would have thought there was some way we could force Office 365 to ignore internal accounts for email routing. So as it stands you have to have email hosted - not just the account - with 365 in order for the other Office 365 services to be accessed?

 

I'm not making a lot of sense myself when reading it back, but I hope someone can decipher what I'm saying!

 

Thanks again,

You will need to setup the so-called "simple domain sharing", as detailed for example here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/domains-faq-1272bad0-4bd4-4796-8005-67d6fb3afc5a#bkmk_pilot

 

In any case, you will need to configure some sort of forwarding to handle the flow. Depending on the setup you can either do "regular" user-level forwarding or set up connectors, etc.

Hi Vasil,

 

Sorry for the slow response.

 

This looks promising, but I am still unsure this is what we will need to do. We spoke to Microsoft phone support and it was advised the proposed setup we want is not going to work, or at least reliably so, to do what we want to do.

 

I think we'll need to rethink.

 

Thanks both,

Hi Patrick,

 

If I understood correctly from your previous posts, your MX records points to Google and you forward mail from there to Office 365. If so, all you need to do is to go to Exchange Online admin center, go to mail flow and change to accepted domains tab. Then double-click the domain in question and change This accepted domain is to Internal Relay and click save. You will get a warning about missing outbound connector, but because your MX points to Google, that is not an issue.

 

That should do it, let us know whether it worked.

Hi Nestori,

 

I'm not sure if I've explained myself very well, sorry.

 

  • Group A have Microsoft Accounts and have their Mail Services provided by the 365 Exchange platform. These email accounts are example@ourdomain.com [example].
  • Group B have Google Accounts and have their Mail Services provided by the Gmail/G Suite for Education platform. These email accounts are example@groupb.ourdomain.com [example].

 

We would like for Group B to be able to log in to the Office 365 service so that they may download and install the Office 2016 applications. However, we have found that if we create them an account for the Office 365 platform for the purpose of acessing Office applications, any email sent internally from the Group A to Group B fails as it can not find an email account for it as it attempts to route email internally. This would otherwise work, if there are no @groupb.domain.com accounts in place on 365.

 

I hope I've made it a bit cleared so that you may better understand - thanks for your help!

Okay, that cleared a lot!

 

For mail routing, the solution is same: set the domain groupb.ourdomain.com as Internal Relay. That changes the behavior so that if you send email to example@groupb.ourdomain.com, and mailbox is not found from Office 365, it is sent to where MX record points to (=Google).

 

If that is already setup, then the problem is that users have the mailbox in Office 365. So, either use Office 365 ProPlus license (which is cheaper than for instance E3), or use E3 but disable Exchange Online. That way users don't have mailboxes so their emails will be routed to Google.