How To

Although it is possible to assign many email aliases to a single account in Office 365 it is not easy to send as an alias using Outlook when composing a new email.

There are two workarounds to this, the first is to use a distribution group and assign users permissions to send from that distribution group. The second, which is the method documented in this post is to set-up a second mail account within Outlook and use the account to send mail via the Office 365 SMTP servers.  This will give you the ability to select the alias using the “From” button when composing a new email.

How to setup Outlook to send from an alias in Office 365

The idea behind this method is to setup a second account in Outlook that will allow sending from an alias that has been defined in Office 365. It would be better if the ability to send as an alias was native to Outlook/Office 365, but it isn’t. See these instructions for how to add an alias with Powershell.

Before you can proceed, you need to find your SMTP settings:  To do this, login to Outlook Web App, click on the little cog in the top right of the screen to bring up the options menu and click on options.

• Login to Outlook Web App
• Click the settings cog in the top right corner
• In the search box at the top of the settings window, type in “pop”:
  
• Click on POP and IMAP
• This will show you the settings you need for POP, IMAP and SMTP access. We only need the SMTP setting:
  

I expect your settings will be the same as mine, which means your Office 365 SMTP Server will be smtp.office365.com.  Before proceeding ensure you have added the alias that you want to send from to your Office 365 account.

Setup Outlook 2016 to send from an email alias

1. 1. Go to “File” and then “Account Settings”.  Click the “Account settings” button and choose “Account Settings”:
      
   2. This will bring up the list of your accounts, click new:
      
   3. Recent versions of Outlook 2016 may show a “Simplified Account Creation Screen”, which makes this process much more difficult:
      
   4. If you see the above screen, follow these instructions to disable simple account creation
   5. On the account Setup screen, select “Manual setup or additional server types”
      
   6. On the next screen choose “POP or IMAP” and then press “Next”.
      
      • “Your name” is the display name that will be presented to the recipient.
      • “Email address” is the email alias that you added to your account in Office 365.
      • Account Type should be POP3.
      • Incoming Mail Server “127.0.0.1”.
      • Outgoing mail server(SMTP) should be set to whatever your SMTP server was shown as in Outlook Web App, but probably smtp.office365.com
      • Username should be your actual Office 365 username, not an email alias.
      • Password should be set to your Office 365 Password.
      • Untick the option “Automatically test account settings when Next is clicked”
   7. Now click on “More Settings …”
   8. Click on the “Outgoing Server” Tab and then tick the box “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”.
      
   9. Click on the “Advanced” tab and then change the “Outgoing Server (SMTP)” setting to 587 and the encryption type to “TLS”.
      
   10. Click OK to return to the previous screen and then click next to add the account.  On the next screen click finish.
   11. When the account was created Outlook created a new PST file for the new account.  We don’t need that as we are not going to be receiving any emails on this account.  You should now be back at the E-Mail accounts screen.  Click on your new account to highlight it and then click on “Change Folder” option.
   12. Select your inbox from your main Exchange account.  Click OK and then Close.  The new PST file will still be in your folder list, but you can remove it by right clicking on it and choosing close.
   13. Now your account is set-up and you will be able to send email from this address by simply selecting the from address when composing a new email.
       
   14. Although you are now in a position to send emails using this address there is one additional step to ensure that Outlook does not attempt to receive email.Click on the “Send / Receive” tab and then click on “Define Send/Receive groups”In the Send/Receive Groups settings, click on “Edit”.  Select your newly created account and untick the box which says “Include the selected account in this group”.  Like the following picture:
       

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