It seems odd that Outlook and Exchange used to make it difficult to work with multiple email addresses in one account. It turns out that there are good reasons to use multiple addresses or even hide an individual address. You may be sharing a customer contact mailbox in your CRM system with several different users, working through a merger of two different companies, or simply want to keep a user’s contact details. are not leaked to the outside world when they are working on a secret product.
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Alias in Exchange
Whatever the reason, it’s increasingly common to give employees more than one address. But until recently, Exchange made it difficult to send messages using alternate identities.
Much of it is by design of Exchange’s mail transfer agent, the code that passes email out to the chain of mail servers that make up the internet. It was originally built to work with just one email address per user, with everything tied to that identity. If you try to send an email using an alias, an alternate email address, it will be overwritten with the primary email address before being sent via SMTP.
If you’re using Exchange in a business, that approach is fine: Support emails appear to come from a support alias because they won’t leave the server or cluster. There’s a vague reason to allow aliases to be received but not used for delivery, as the user can then redirect messages by replying from their correct address.
However, email now needs to do more than connect parts of the business – that’s how we do business. And aliases are part of those processes, especially as email-enabled tools like Microsoft 365 Bookings become more common.
Incoming aliases have long been built into both Exchange and on-premises Exchange Online. You can give a user up to 400 different aliases without affecting how much you are charged. Alias are not shared mailboxes or distribution lists: They are individual addresses that can be used to route messages to specific mailboxes.
While you can use distribution lists to receive, route, and send email, they don’t give you the same level of control as individual aliases for users and shared mailboxes. There are sophisticated low-level techniques that allow Exchange users to send messages as aliases, but they require working with custom email clients that use specific SMTP commands, not the familiar Outlook.
Manage Aliases in Exchange Online
Alias for active user
It’s simple enough to add an alias using the Microsoft 365 admin center. If you’re using alternate domains, make sure they’re configured before adding aliases to users.
In the Admin Center, select Active Users under Users in the navigation pane. Once the page is open, select a user and click on their name to open the users pane. Here you can select Manage Usernames and Emails to add an alias. You can enter any username and choose any currently configured domain. Once configured, click Save Changes to set up the alias.
Alternate domain
Alternate domains need to be set up with all the correct DNS settings for your Microsoft 365 account. That requires adding them to your Microsoft 365 account using the Setup tool in the Admin center.
Once you’ve added the domain, connect it to your account by verifying it with the TXT record in the domain’s DNS records before configuring the MX record to send mail to the Microsoft 365 Exchange Online service . If you are going to send mail through this domain, you need to first configure its SPF, DKIM, and DMARC anti-spam features on your DNS server.
Change company name
After you change the company name, you can set up an address like [email protected] as an alias for [email protected], with mail sent to the old company name address in the new company name account his usual. You should use aliases to redirect messages sent to common aliases to a single mailbox, so [email protected] could be an alias for [email protected] more formally.
Similarly, you can alias a team account so that all possible variations of the team name, like “accountspayable”, “account”, “account.payable” and any others, will end up end up in the same mail account. You should review your message logs to see if there are common errors for important addresses that you can trap and reroute with an alias.
Send mail as an alias from Outlook
Recent Updates for Exchange Online finally added preview support for sending messages using aliases. Initially, you need to use PowerShell to set the SendFromAliasEnabled parameter of the Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlet. When you set this, you can enable full alias support for all mailboxes; there is currently no way to set it for individual users or groups.
Once it’s enabled, you’re using the new instance of Exchange’s SMTP service. As Microsoft pointed out, it’s in preview for now, as there are known issues that can cause problems in some cases. On-premises Exchange has no new features, which means that any on-premises users will not be able to send using an alias.
Not all Exchange email clients support the new feature. It is currently supported in the Outlook mobile apps on iOS and Android, and in Outlook on the web. Support for Outlook desktop is due in Q2 2022, but it hasn’t arrived yet.
On the web, you need to display the From When Compose field, with a drop-down list of available aliases. On mobile devices, you must enter an alias manually, but the alias will be saved for future use. When it’s released for Outlook desktop, you’ll be able to maintain a list of commonly used aliases, which will simplify picking and choosing which aliases to use.
Once you’ve set up support, users will find working with aliases simple enough. If necessary, they can hide their personal address or use a pseudonym or an alternate mail domain name to ensure that the email is delivered to them regardless of how it is resolved.
Microsoft’s plan to merge Outlook online with its desktop version will speed the delivery of features like this. An Outlook codebase across all versions avoids situations where different Outlooks have different implementations of the same feature or not at all.
