Use of own domain name with Office 365 Home/Premium

Thanks.  We actually have 5 domains a.com, b.com, c.com, d.com and e.com. not one domain with subdomains, so even less likely to be able to incorporate into O365 based on what you describe.  Cheaper by far to stick with hosting my own email with one old laptop hosting the mail server and costing about £15 per year to run...

 We have 5 domains, so each person has first.lastname.com and a full suite of email addresses if they choose.  An expensive bit of fun but if all 5 were moved to GoDaddy, would they all be accessible via O365, or would one then need 5 O365 accounts?

So you have one domain and then everyone has a subdomain?

Looking at O365 Home (one subscription with up to 6 users / office licenses), this is not going to work:

While I assume (but I never checked) that it's possible to use a subdomain as well, 

In O365 Home, the owner of the subscription is admin, sharing the licenses with up to 5 other users.

He (alone) can set up one (!) domain that all other users can use to create one email-address per user.

So: same domain / subdomain for all. 

******@family.com + ******@family.com +... 

IF dubdomains work in general (as said, I never checked); 

you could only achieve this by using a number of individual O365 Personal licenses.

So everybody gits his own O365 personal license and then sets up his individual subomain.

But of course that's way more expensive.

So all in all: 

sorry, not really a reasonable way to get done what you want.

This is really helpful and apologies for not replying sooner but I have been otherwise engaged...

Aside from the more family time, the main benefit (for me) would seem to be the full calendar side of things as I assume that would be available on mobile versions of Outlook, whereas at the moment I have not found a way to sync my server calendar with mobile apps, including Outlook.  Not a massive issue but it would be nice to pop something in the calendar on the move and see it from the desktop later, or v.v.

One more question if I may.  We have 5 domains, so each person has first.lastname.com and a full suite of email addresses if they choose.  An expensive bit of fun but if all 5 were moved to GoDaddy, would they all be accessible via O365, or would one then need 5 O365 accounts?

Common mindset at microsoft ...'users dont want to do that' (often with more than a hint of arrogance) .... then some other company makes it, is incredibly successful and microsoft eventually catch up and realise that users did actually want it...

I own a number of domains for family members and run a Linux server with Scalix email (akin to MS Exchange).  We use the desktop version of Outlook to connect to the Scalix server in the same way you would connect to an Exchange server.  

What, if anything, would be the benefit to a person like me to moving my domain to GoDaddy and accessing via my O365 subscription? Would MS host my mail and would I then be able to access it via MS Exchange in Outlook desktop or am I limited to IMAP?  I know you can do this with the business versions as I know someone doing that but it is not clear whether that is what is on offer for O365 Home.

Can someone "de-confuse" me?

Let the deconfusing begin :)

You would have something pretty similar to a "full Exchange" account. 

You could use it within Outlook web interface as well as with Outlook Desktop.

Also you have the full calendar, contacts etc features from Exchange. 

So this is definitely more than IMAP.

If you have O365 home with multiple users, you can create accounts for them. However if you plan to do stuff such as sharing contacts / folders of contacts or using a shared calendar, then you should give it a careful try with a demo domain before considering migrating: it's not completely the same as "corporate exchange" (which sucks in proper sharing anyway).

So what's in it for you? 

Well, if you already run a server one could argue that you probably get about the same kind of features. On one hand you don't have to put in work yourself any more - more family time, huraaay. On the other hand, you are somewhat limited to what MS gives you: no extra accounts for the printer or a secondary mail-address - the maximum you get is 6 accounts (O365 home license limit - 1 for each 365 home user).

Also - as said before - your domain should better be at godaddy (read the last pages about exceptions). Which can, depending on your TLD, be costly.

So if this is a good fit for you is vey much dependant on lots of details.

[I ultimately decided not to move our "productive" accounts (yet): no extra spam account for me, too complicated to re-configure all family members all over the country at the same time; my TLD is WAY more expensive at godaddy then where I am now, and, last not least: I don't want my email stored in the US. My current provider operates from the EU.]