Use of own domain name with Office 365 Home/Premium

I also work in the IT business and know that there is a small risk of abuse by 'business' users using the home packages, but, in my opinion, a real business needs business support, which they cannot get with the home packages.  At work we have O365 E3 with >100 users and we need to have peace of mind with MS support when things go wrong or do not work as expected ... and their business support is fantastic.

On the other hand I think MS is raking up a lot of $$$ with the O365 home subscriptions.  Home users used to just buy the software once every approximately 5 years and never upgrade ... not to mention the many illegal copies there used to be all over the place.  With the subscription model, home users find it less compelling to obtain illegal copies (with their various risks), so overall, I think MS is making more money from home users than previously.  They can afford to lose some small 'businesses' who think they can cheat by using the home packages.

I still think that having the option for families to use their own custom domain name will not hurt anyone financially.

Agree, it would be nice.  But it looks Microsoft does not offer any e-mail storage space with their home versions of Office365.  So no place for the mail to spool up until your Outlook client can retrieve it.  They do offer that with their business and enterprise versions.

Why not get a cheap website from a hosting provider like GoDaddy, 1and1, or any of the many other providers out there?  You can probably find one for under $10 per month and they usually support POP3 and IMAP accounts.  If you just want mail it looks like 1and1 has accounts with 2GB of space for $2/month.  I'm not endorsing any of the providers mentioned, just using them as examples.  I actually have a VPS with a provider that I use for my own e-mail hosting in addition to selling hosting services to others.  So that more than covers the cost of my VPS.

Some domain registrars will let you set up e-mail forwarding from ******@yourdomain.com to another e-mail account.  So you could point to an outlook.com or other free account.  But it gets trickier when you want to send mail and have it come from ******@yourdomain.com using one of those free e-mail providers.  That's why I think some hosting space that you use for e-mail is a better option.  And if you want to put up a family website you already have the space. 

Just my 2 cents worth.

I also work in the IT business and know that there is a small risk of abuse by 'business' users using the home packages, but, in my opinion, a real business needs business support, which they cannot get with the home packages.  At work we have O365 E3 with >100 users and we need to have peace of mind with MS support when things go wrong or do not work as expected ... and their business support is fantastic.

On the other hand I think MS is raking up a lot of $$$ with the O365 home subscriptions.  Home users used to just buy the software once every approximately 5 years and never upgrade ... not to mention the many illegal copies there used to be all over the place.  With the subscription model, home users find it less compelling to obtain illegal copies (with their various risks), so overall, I think MS is making more money from home users than previously.  They can afford to lose some small 'businesses' who think they can cheat by using the home packages.

I still think that having the option for families to use their own custom domain name will not hurt anyone financially.

I misread your post, what you are talking about is totally unrelated to the issue here. I though you where talking about outlook.com. And option to add imap account there. I find no such option. I have no use of adding my email provider to MS outlook, I want to drop my email provider and only use outlook.com to handle my email (with my own domain).

To add an outlook.com mail account to MS Outlook

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Add-your-Outlook-com-account-in-Outlook-2013-or-higher-642c1902-bdd9-4dc3-abe7-76d60b148b23?CorrelationId=6671e03c-45d4-469b-b0c7-aafe6ba74530&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Thanks for tip, I'm already doing this (pop, don't see imap option). But I wanted to end my email subscription and have the mail delivered directly to my outlook account without delay. How often do outlook.com pop external mail ? Where is the imap option ?