Sending email as alias in office365?

Copper Contributor

I used to have my domain email hosted in office 365. The reason i switched was because of a lack of a feature i really needed. You had the ability to create multiple aliases in office 365 so you could receive multiple emails for your domain in your inbox. For example say my domain was example.org. I could recieve emails from

bob@example.org <--primary email address

orders@example.org

newsletters@example.org.

 

the only big thing missing was that you could not "send" from any email other than the primary email. so in the example above i could not send email as orders@example.org or newsletters@example.org. I could only send email as bob@example.org. Is this still true or can you send email from aliases? I don't want it to look like it came from the primary email "orders@example.org in care of bob@example.org".  The email i send with an alias should really look like it came from the alias. This is the only reason i'm on GApps and i'm hope to swtich back. Is this feature still missing?

 

thanks

189 Replies

I just migrated my email from GSuite to O365 and I'm slowly learning the pitfalls of O365 that you took for granted on GSuite

 

The only problem with these various solution is that you can really only have 1 alias to send from, as you can't use the same display name.

 

I've got varying versions of my surname e.g. james@surname.xy, james@surname.net.xyz, james@surname.co.xyz.

 

In this scenario I'd create two distribution groups, or shared mailboxes, but they can't have the same display name.. so I'd have to create James L 1 and James L 2 (as an example) but then the from address ends up being James L 1 (james@surname.xy) which is stupid..

 

Not sure to understand your problem...

In your scenario, you should have added several domains to the tenant (i.e. "surname.xy", "surname.net.xyz", etc.). Hence you could indeed create separate DLs and/or SMs such as "james@surname.xy", "james@surname.net.xyz", etc., which do appear as senders.

Hi Salvatore,

 

as far as I understood he's talking about the display name.

He means he can't create 2 shared mailboxes or groups this manner:

1) "James"  <aaa@bbb.cc>

and

2) "James" <ddd@eee.ff>

As above, I'm talking about the display name. I already have the domains added to my tenant so that part isn't the issue.

 

The issue is you can't create a D/L, or contact, or shared mailbox, etc, with the same display name

Hi James,

It looks the only way to get what you want is using the cloud service I've mentioned earlier.

@Victor Ivanidze I did look at Choosefrom 365 but I don't want to send my emails through an unknown third party (to me), nor edit the subject to define which address to send from.

 

I figured out a kludge way of having multiple shared mailboxes with the same name, is to utilise a spare license and create a normal user with mailbox (with the same name) on the alias domain, then convert it into a shared mailbox.

 

It would be nice if Microsoft supported this natively one day

@James Leonard

Have you tried to change the display name by powershell?

I hadn't tried that yet @Salvatore Biscari

 

I'll try that when I have to do this again with another user

I know this may have been an old thread but I didn't see any of the real answers here. Maybe my setup is different enough but this is as easy as typing in the alias that you want to send from.

 

Although this has been available in earlier versions, I'm now using Office 365. The From field of an outgoing message is a dropdown field and in the dropdown I can select to send from any of my current email accounts OR I can select the option listed as "Other email address". With this option, I can enter any other address I chose and the recipient sees this other address as the source and the reply goes to the "other" address.  You do need to select one of your current email addresses for the outgoing SMTP service for delivery, but the recipient should see the Reply-to as being the other address you specified. 

 

A review of the recipients header would reveal the source as your SMTP server, but the reply should go to the entered address.

Hi Chris,

 

let's suppose your default email address in Office 365 is SMTP:charette1@contoso.com and your alias is smtp:charette2@contoso.com.

Could you please explain how can you send as charette2@contoso.com using Office 365 OWA?

Thank you,

Victor Ivanidze

f I missed the part of the part of the question about using OWA, then I apologize, I don't use OWA, but use the desktop version of MS Outlook. In the desktop versions, you can do as I discussed. Here is the same explanation with an image showing how this is accomplished.

 

When creating a new email or replying to an email, the From field is a dropdown. Open the dropdown, and below all the email accounts you have configured is an option for "Other Email Address..." Select this, and enter the alias email address you want to use. Then, when the recipient opens the email, the Reply-To address they see will be the alias address that you entered.

 

Alias.png

 

 

 

I've tried this myself, setting up a DL, removing the alias from my primary profile and setting it up as the email address in the DL, waited for replication, and emailed both internal and external to my organization and the email head still shows from my primary address. We also have Exclaimer set up to auto insert our signature lines and if it's not reflecting the correct @, the correct signature does not apply. Any other suggestions? 

Sound similar to my setup .. using DL permission with delegation permission and send as to send FROM and it works for me.

 

I did run into a bit of a problem sending from windows desktop app. The problem occurs appears to be that when manually toggle the FROM to use this DL the "offline GL" was not syncd and did not reflect the DL  .. if you manually drill down ie click on the other email address and select directly from from the GAL (live to your account) rather than the offline GAL  then can send without issue  .

 

I have an active support case to sort out why my offline GAL on my desktop outlook 2016 is not syncing properly or timely to the GAL. There is more going on that just simply setting the default in the address book to point to the GAL rather than the offline GAL. I have done that and it is persistent.

 

The issue is when i click on FROM and it presents cached emails addresses that were previously set / selected as FROM email .. even if selected directly from the GAL .. if select from the cached emails the exactly same email will error out .. so only way to make it go is to select directly from the GAL ..

 

my guess, unconfirmed from the o365 support engineers,  is there is some code related to the recently retired connected accounts code .. the connected accounts had an autoreply feature that auto set the from on a reply to an email received into a connected account. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom (not) retired the connected account feature this past September 2018. Possibly did not back off this code and something not working right.

 

I have replicated all steps with O365 support engineers. They then tell me they need to research and then its days before i hear from them and we have trouble connecting. That is where my issue stands.

 

Hope this helpss

 

 

This sending from a Domain Alias, not  a user alias.

 

What is a domain alias and what it's difference from a secondary SMTP address (aka e-mail alias) of a user?

A alias and sec mail address is basically the same! You can only send from your primary mail address! You can have two mail addresses but then you need separate accounts for these in order to choose which to send from

Adam

Correct. Alternatively you can use a third-party cloud service to send as alias.

I am considering using the DL route and testing has gone well.  One issue I am facing is that I am populating Email Signature via AD attributes via Hub Transport Rules.  I can't find any way to add a phone number to a DL.  Does anyone know if this is possible?  If not, do any of the other options like Shared Mailbox or Email contact or other give an option to configure a phone number to the AD object.  

It's great that experienced techs here are giving it their all, but this situation clearly isn't ideal for a stable and reliable IT environment.  Just because one can use workarounds to do something, who's to say Microsoft doesn't put out an update to one of the many contributing products in this equation that renders the workaround nonfunctional? Meanwhile you've assured your executive team this can be done. 

 

Any IT manager will tell you, better to say it's not possible than to promise something you can't sustain, and based on the varying responses to many people doing some of the very same steps here, it seems it's not something consistent across all editions/setups.  Besides, surprisingly, nobody has mentioned the simple option of just adding an email-only Office 365 account:  for CAD $61.20/yr. (USD $45.50) you can get Exchange Online Plan 1 for a user and just be done with it.  I'm certain the time you've put into figuring this out plus dealing with future glitches costs more than this, even if you're talking 5 or 6 such accounts.  If you have to do this for 100's of users, good luck with the distribution list thing  ;)