Use of own domain name with Office 365 Home/Premium

EXACTLY!!!

This thread has been open for over four years now. In that time it has been stated many times that this is a product gap. So, yes, fully agree that this needs to be addressed by MS product management. I suspect that they are trying to encourage small businesses to go on business plans as opposed to the family plan. The unfortunate effect is that they are pushing away a whole category of users - families that wan to run their family "business" (integrated set of services comprised of email, calendar, file management, office apps, etc). All that is needed really is a Family product that includes email hosting with support for custom domains. There is already a limit of five users for the O365 Family which will ensure appropriate tiering between Family and Business plans. Any businesses that can run on five licences, well, so what? If they grow they will upgrade and if not MS still gets a paying customer. I am really not sure if MS is just ignorant on this issue or they are simply stubborn! It would be good to have some real answers though and not just "thank you for your feedback".

Hi,

A crazy idea. Probably will not work, but what if

has anyone tried to try getting a Business subscription for 1 month or so, setting up domain and 1 user, and then switching (not sure if it is even possible) the plan to Home and see if the domain settings remain? 

Unfortunately, between the O365 home platform and the O365 business platform, there is no direct "switching over".

This description, albeit discussing a switchover "the other way around" (home -> business) explains how to switch, bascially:

• create a totally new, fresh account
• copy all data over manually.

Note the first dropdown "Understanding the key differences...".

This shows how there is no way to transition and keep some features.

So sorry, again: no solution to our problem.

This can only be solved by MS product management.

As long as they continue to not offer this, there's little we can do apart from keep telling them how uterly stupid this decision is. 

As MS usually bluntly ignores any and all user feedback as long as it doesn't come from big corp customers, we have unfortunately rather poor prospects for this.

Dear Rich,

If I change the MX records on the domain, will this now be picked up in Outlook.com?

unfortunately this is not going to work: to get email working as we all here would like to, two things are required: 

1. MX setting of the domains provides the sending mail server with the information of where to deliver the message to.

  You can't set your MX right now because you would not know what to set it to.

2. The reiving mailserver (= MS Office Exchange Instance or whatever they call it) needs to be made aware that it shall accept mail for your domain, as well as into what mailbox in what account it shall deliver it to.

As there is no Interface to "tell this to the MS mail server", it will not be aware of your domain and thus reject anything that is sent to it.

You could actually test this manually via telnet. If you would know a server address in the first place (see 1.)

But there's not really a point. It's not going to work.

The fact that outlook.com uses your domain as an alias, does not help / is not relevant in any way for this.

It's just a sad hard fact that MS product management has decided that their "Office product for the private client segment" shall obviously not provide this feature - for whatever reason.   As we have already discussed at lenght here, this feature *was* already available but was discontinued, so I suspect there is rather a political reason to this (lure people into business contracts) than a technical.

Basically the only thing you can do is to raise this time and time again in forums and e.g. at uservoice (here) which is MS internal customer feedback portal.

But apart from that, there is no workaround. As sad as that is. Crapy product management.

I just signed a new user up to Office 365 Home with their existing custom domain email address which uses another host.

The sign up page for Office 365 Home states:

Premium Outlook.com experience

Enjoy advanced protection against phishing and malware for up to 5 Outlook.com accounts, plus no ads and a 50 GB mailbox.

I then went to Outlook.com and was signed in with the same email address went into settings and "Manage or choose a primary alias" there is a drop down where the custom domain is already listed.

If I change the MX records on the domain, will this now be picked up in Outlook.com?

It's now July 2018 and Outlook Premium which supported custom domains has come and gone but has this method of adding a custom domain slipped through the net ... for new customers only?

Not sure I want to change the MX records just to find out this will not work.

Rich