Use of own domain name with Office 365 Home/Premium

You need to have a Hosted Exchange mail account with a Hosted Exchange provider.

Otherwise I don't know what you are talking about.

Appreciate your chiming in, briefly, however it's not clear at all how a Hosted Exchange Account or Accounts for each family member along with an O365 Home Premium subscription addresses the subject of this thread. 

A helpful post from you would elaborate on how that would work.    If it does work, Microsoft has made solving for a very common family requirement utterly confusing such that otherwise tech savvy folks on this thread have been stymied for a year trying to get something that took 30 minutes to setup on Google Apps for free.   Even so, we'd all be interested in this work around.

Err Word 2010 doesn't "support" domains either.

Sorry, I didn't mean that word supports that. I meant that I am still using Office 2010, and because of the situation with the domains in office 365, I will not be upgrading to 365 from 2010.

You can use your own domain with 365 Home, but only if that domain supports the pop or IMAP protocol

You can also create an outlook.com mail account and under your Domain Providers web setting access redirect mail to an alternate address (outlook.com)

Appreciate your response.   However, I don't want pop or IMAP...or redirection, setting that for my 6 users including mobile devices is a real problem.   Support when my mother has a problem would be a real headache.    I'd have to setup 6 ******@outlook.com email addresses, correct?   and still have my domain with Google or some other provider who would Pop Forward to these new extraneous emails...confusing and special setup for each users including when they get a new device or PC.   For myself a technical user it may be usable but not for my family. 

 That defeats the purpose of having your own domain.  Also, I want my emails to come FROM my email address not x******@outlook.com.    

Unless I misunderstand this entirely, POP forwarding is not the answer.

You can use your own domain with 365 Home, but only if that domain supports the pop or IMAP protocol

You can also create an outlook.com mail account and under your Domain Providers web setting access redirect mail to an alternate address (outlook.com)

Yes, I concur with your understanding and I am in the same position as you with regards to Google Apps.  I have it free because I had subscribed a long time ago.

I still do not see why MS do not want to open this up for O365 Home.  After all, we are paying an annual fee for 5 users.

As Tom said, it is very common nowadays for families to own a domain name ... which they cannot use with O365.

Personally, I do not think MS have anything to lose if they give us this functionality.  I just hope that they look at these threads sometimes to get our feedback :-)

Well I am in exactly the same situation. As far as I am concerned this is a big gap in the Family plan and it's preventing me from migrating from Google Apps. $50/month for a family of four to go to the business edition is just too much. I wish MS would address this. Custom domains are really not that unusal in the family/personal space.