I have M365 Family and a domain name not on GoDaddy

As mentioned - to assign a personal domain using Microsoft 365 requires that the domain is registered with Godaddy. It just requires moving the domain from your current registrar to Godaddy and then it will get automatically configured using the steps in

Get a personalized email address in Microsoft 365
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-...

The screenshot is from the <Domain FAQs> in the above article

Yea, the problem is English "the language". What does MS mean by "support" anyway? And who needs it? Its like Office. MS no longer "support" many past editions which still work perfectly well the way they were designed to do (and which I paid for as a "perpetual" license - whatever that means. Put it another way - the contract that we have with MS should be considered not to be worth the electricity to illuminate it on the screen. So, if the product works at the the time you pay for it, then use it - otherwise don't. Do not depend on ever getting "support" from MS; whatever way you define it or whatever way MS, or rather the particular employee you talk to defines it. So to come back to the subject. Yes you can use your own registrar, as long as they or you can program your the DNS entries for your domain and you can find the correct ones to use (available from your registrar or on the internet): BUT you will get no employee of MS to tell you how to do this or what the entries are (since they are bound by the NDA between MS and GoDaddy) i.e as mentioned you will get no support from MS or its employees.

I had a Microsoft account name as the same as my preferred email, but all is not lost!

The clue is that you can't have your 'primary alias' as your personalised email address. So how to stop it being 'primary'?

Go to accounts.microsoft.com, personal info and Manage how you sign in to Microsoft.

Add a new alias, creating an outlook.com address on the way.

Specify that as your primary alias. Then delete your old primary alias which is your preferred email (a heart-stopping moment).

This frees up the name and you can go to Outlook and add it as your preferred email.

A benefit is that after doing so, not only does the email appear to come from that email, but at the receiving end the header.from and smtp.mailfrom match so it doesn't get treated as junk by recipients.

And the personalised email still works for signing in to your Microsoft account or W10 PC sign in with MS.

I was also able to add the email to Thunderbird, though I had to create an app-specific password to keep security happy. Just in time for the trial period end.

Thanks for doing the research - your directions are clear.

On the same microsoft.com page Karl referenced, I see that "Outlook.com currently does not support DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)." Have you looked at the e-mail generated after completing the transition and checked if any spam protection is enabled? SPF at least?

Does the e-mail show as originating from your domain, or from outlook.com? FWIW, e-mail I send out from my unmodified M365 account shows as coming 'via outlook.com', and is signed by outlook.com's DKIM

I would hope that switching to a custom domain would use the custom domain as the mailfrom address, even if they don't use DKIM to sign it.

This should continue to work when "test12345.family" expires.

You just need those dns records that I mentioned. The problem is the one for "*.pamx1.hotmail.com" and trying to figure what * is. That is why created the cheap GoDaddy domain.

David

From this...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/configure-a-custom-email-domain-account-as-an-exchange-account-in-outlook-1402a3e9-4300-4e2f-a5fa-875d6f7a658e

It seems like I just need to *.pamx1.hotmail.com server is for my email, but I can't seem to find a place to get that.