I have M365 Family and a domain name not on GoDaddy

Thank you for help Karl.

The one piece of information that I was missing the unique identifier for my M365 Family account. Here is how I got it to work.

1. If you have no reason to NOT USE GoDaddy then use GoDaddy. It is just easier. Continuing a registrar other than GoDaddy is only for the computer grease monkeys.
2. If you do prefer your registrar then it is possible, after all, it is all about the DNS. Here is how.

a. Find a deal on a cheap GoDaddy domain. I got one for 99 cents and I used a throw away domain name, e.g. "test12345.family"

b. Once you have purchased it on GoDaddy, turn off the auto-renew so that GoDaddy does not renew the domain after you have forgot about it.

c. Go to Outlook.com and sign in.

d. Click on the Manage Premium diamond and tell it you want a personalized email address

e. Tell it use the existing GD domain that you just created for 99 cents.

f. On success, login to GoDaddy and manage your domain. You should see the following 5 records. Note the MX and the TXT "_outlook" records. The number is your unique id: 13832XXXX

g. Enter the domain records into your registrar. They are all necessary. _domainconnect appears to make it all easy.

h. Now go back to outlook.com and Premium > Personalized email address.

i. Remove your throw away domain.

j. Tell to personalize your email again and enter the domain name that you want. It will say that it found a GoDaddy domain.

k. When ready, setup your email.

Hope this helps someone.

Did this break once the original "test12345.family" domain expired?

Is it necessary to register a domain at GoDaddy at all, if you already have one and are able to make DNS changes yourself?

The emails on our account are something like...

        \*\*\* Email address is removed for privacy \*\*\* 

        \*\*\* Email address is removed for privacy \*\*\* 

If I send an email from one of those, is there a way to search the email header and find the MX server? It shows something like...

        Received: from NEX42-TE8-obe.outbound.protection.outlook.com - doesn't resolve  

or

        Received: from SN8PR07MB4990.namprd07.prod.outlook.com - does resolve  

It looks like the CNAME for domainconnect.gd.domaincontrol.com doesn't actually resolve to anything. Can you even use an underscore in a CNAME ( _domainconnect.gd.domaincontrol.com )?

I could just setup forwarders for...

        \*\*\* Email address is removed for privacy \*\*\* to forward to \*\*\* Email address is removed for privacy \*\*\*

        \*\*\* Email address is removed for privacy \*\*\* to forward to \*\*\* Email address is removed for privacy \*\*\*   

...which would essentially accomplish the same thing except that people might see those aliased emails when they reply. It also leaves another forwarding service in the middle of the email flow which is not desirable as it's another potential point of failure/troubleshooting.

I get trying to make it easy for most, but it just seems odd that they don't allow people to figure this out manually if they want to.

EDIT - I posted fake emails, but whatever.

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.

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

@puppydawgy I noticed that the URL for the GoDaddy "Domain Connect" page contains:

"mxRecordValue=123456789"

Where "123456789" is possibly one's MX record number. So, probably no need to buy the cheap temporary domain name --just copy the "mxRecordValue" number in the URL. This could probably replace 'step e' in your above instruction. I'll let you confirm that it is the same thing.

URL example: (what to look for) https://domainconnect.godaddy.com/v2/domainTemplates/providers/outlook.com/services/personalizedoutlookemail/apply?mxRecordValue=123456789&state=00000000000000000000000000000000&redirect_url=https%3A%2F%2Foutlook.live.com/mail/LaunchDomainConnectNextStep.html

I haven't yet tried your setup steps as I'm not quite ready to pull the plug on my Google Suite service.