Use of own domain name with Office 365 Home/Premium

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)

For clarity, what's being ask for is the support to *receive* mail on your own custom domain direct to Outlook without resorting to forwarding or requiring a domain or ISP mail account that you fetch mail from using POP or IMAP. Besides that the latter option is very messy when presented in Outlook. Some don't provide a mail account anyway.

Yes the vast majority of home users don't bother with a domain, though personally I recommend they do. It provides a personal or a family domain that isn't tying your email address to an ISP or mail service like Outlook or GMail, so easy to move around without having to update your email addresses on hundreds of web sites and tell everyone you've changed address.

Many though do use their own domain and like to have the flexibility to have an address for each family member under the same domain or a personalised domain, or even use an address per site they sign up to so they can control and trace spam more easily amongst other things.

There are various issues with forwarding that make it less practical to use a domain, compared to the mail server (e.g. Outlook) just accepting mail for the configured domain. Also some domain providers either won't provide mail forwarding, or charge extra for it, plus you are relying on their own forwarding service working. Proper domain support means the mail goes direct to the mail server.

I have just found this thread. I used to be able to do exactly what Chris described in this original post when I was using Office as a stand alone product. I changed to office 365 early last years and initially it worked that I could send email through my outlook.com account with a personal domain.

Around the middle of last year it stopped working. I thought it was something to do with my email/domain host who forwarded my emails automatically to outlook.com but after contacting them and spending quite a few hours trying to fix it, it appeared that Microsoft had changed a setting that stopped this from working. We lodged a query with Microsoft but never got a response.

I think it is now clear that they have now prevented this so that you have to subscribe to office 365 for small business to get this functionality.

I just purchase 2 years worth of 365 subscription. Because I was told I needed to upgrade to office365 from outlook.com to use my own domain. Office support webiste is full off info on how to do this, but it doesn't work.

If your Domain provider also supplies the email settings for pop or IMAP then that mail account can be added to MS Outlook

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 ?