O365 Mail forwarding Question

[brianlyp]

I am wondering if it is possible to set up a forwarding object in O365 that does not have a mailbox attached. I am looking to set up a few users on GCC High, which as I understand would require a new mail domain, so I would like to set up something that would let their clients to continue to use their current email address and have the messages forwarded to their GCC High mailbox. The key part is the current email address would need to not have an actual mailbox attached to it. I had a setup like this at a former job, but I do not know how it was done. Any help would be appreciated. 

[#2]

Hi @brianlyp,

There is a few ways you could achieve this.

1.) Set up an email alias on the new mailbox. Article here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/email/add-another-email-alias-for-a-user?view=o365-...

2.) Set up a Distribution Group for each user and add their new mailboxes to each respective Distribution list. See article

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/email/add-user-or-contact-to-distribution-list?view...

If it's just a concern about the licensing and that you don't want to pay for the mailboxes you could just convert the old mailboxes, add forward to the new mailboxes and remove licences from the old mailboxes. Shared Mailboxes do not cost. See article

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/email/convert-user-mailbox-to-shared-mailbox?view=o...

Hope this helps to answer your question!

Best, Chris

[#3]

I'm not entirely sure I understand your scenario. Generally speaking, you can forward to any email address, the server doenst care whether it has a mailbox or not. The same is true for the other side as well, you can forward/redirect messages addressed to a given email without the need of having a mailbox for it. You simply cannot use the "regular" forwarding settings for this, as those are configured on a mailbox level. You can create another object as Chris suggested, or you can just configure a transport rule.

If the problem you are trying to solve is to redirect to newly created mailboxes in a new tenant, which doesn't use the same domain, simply use the default @tenant.onmicrosoft.com domain.

Better yet, give a specific example so we can guide you better.