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Microsoft is killing custom domain names in Outlook.com
- smileybarry 4y agoI just got the email mentioned in the article (and that's the only blog source I found for it, including Microsoft.com). After the whole G Suite Free cancellation I thought about switching my domain email to Outlook for that benefit, but I decided against moving. Guess that was a good call.
- borissk 4y agoThis would've not impacted you, if you did move - they stop offering the feature to new customers, but will keep it working for existing users. I've had a couple of free emails with custom domains setup probably 15 years ago (Microsoft went through a few different names for this service since) and they work to this day. The only difference is I can't create new email accounts in the custom domains.
- anoojb 4y agoI was in the same boat. Now feeling lucky I didn't make that mistake. Makes you wonder how much of this has to do with fraud and spam mitigation. It must be bad enough that they are throwing out the baby...
- smileybarry 4y agoIt would, because I make aliases and other mailboxes occasionally. (E.g.: Apple/Google developer program public-facing alias) I don't want to be locked into just the one name forever.
- bpye 4y agoIf you're looking for a new provider I'd vouch for Fastmail. I switched from Google's free plan back when they killed Inbox, and I've been pretty happy with it.
- nicce 4y agoTutanota is not bad either. Still a small provider but growing. They have also E2EE calendar.
- gaganyaan 4y agoDid not care for Tutanota, mostly because I don't want to have yet another Electron app running. I just wanted to use Tutanota as an email host, with E2EE enabled where available/feasible. Instead, I couldn't use Thunderbird to access my email, which kind of killed it for me.
- nicce 4y agoPGP encryption is problematic, and Tutanota is not using it. Therefore, adding Thunderbird support is challenging. There are around 15 people working in Tutanota, and without Electron they really can’t provide it for every platform.
- smileybarry 4y agoMy problem is that I use my G Suite Free as a sort-of alias, it all still goes to my main Gmail (that I can't change due to billions of accounts pointing to it) and I then send replies back with the @domain.name identity (and associated SMTP). I haven't been able to find a service to fill that niche that isn't a whole inbox, but also doesn't feel like some shaky registrar IMAP/SMTP setup. It's definitely a deliverability perk to have Google serve my domain. Cloudflare have a really nice incoming email redirection feature and I wanted to use it, but they don't support sending emails by design.
- bpye 4y agoYou can configure Fastmail to do that, but I guess it would be in reverse. I have some old Google accounts (old student email and pre-custom domain gmail) configured to forward mail to Fastmail, and then Fastmail configured to send email via Google for those email addresses too. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278022-Using-other-email-addresses https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278022-Us...
- rainsford 4y agoI had a similar thought, although I ended up actually trying out Microsoft's full O365 suite instead since I figured if I was going to end up paying for something, I might as well consider alternatives that might be less flaky than Google's commitment to products. Sounds like Outlook wouldn't have been a good choice with this feature getting killed, but O365 was a whole different kind of hassle. For my incredibly simple setup, it was amazing how complex Microsoft managed to make it. I have never had to read so much documentation in my life to do what were intuitive tasks in G Suite's interface. I ended up abandoning it for Cloudflare+Sendgrid which met my needs and was simpler to set up despite involving two different providers. Honestly I think configuring my own mail server from scratch would have been simpler than Microsoft made it. All that to say, my impression is that Microsoft is not really interested in serving the power user or small team market and is comfortable with a feature set and interface intended for what would otherwise be an Exchange admin at a Fortune 500. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but I get it from a profit margin standpoint at the very least.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoSpammers love this feature of Outlook.com. Services like Outlook.com and Gmail are good at ensuring that their servers are not blocked and that their email gets delivered, perfect for spam delivery. Here is a fun one... You get spam from that appears to be from outlook.com. You look at the email header and find the IP address. You lookup the IP Address registration info and find that it is registered to Microsoft, included in that registration is the email address abuse@microsoft.com. You email abuse@microsoft.com to tell them about the spammer, they respond telling you that you told the wrong people and refuse to send your message to the right people. Microsoft could care less about being a major spam provider.
- smileybarry 4y agoThis is about using a custom domain, and it's not a free feature. It's only if you pay for Microsoft 365 Personal/Family, or any of the 365 business plans. (They're killing it for 365 Personal/Family plans) Spammers can still use a ...@outlook.com address as before, and if they made it to having a domain + paid Microsoft 365 subscription, Microsoft have a credit card to blacklist.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoI get plenty of custom domain name spam that comes through outlook.com (I'm not even talking about M365/O365). Free or not, Outlook.com is abused for spam constantly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smileybarry 4y agoOutlook.com custom domain is M365/O365, it's one of the paid features in those plans.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoFair enough. For $7.00 you can add up to 900 domains to one account and spam away for a month. As long as you setup SPF, DMARC, and DKIM then your messages are likely to be delivered. Switch accounts and domains as often as you like. It is not much of a cost and almost all of it can be automated.
- kosik 4y agoLooks like they are giving 1 year before actually introducing that change. It's either the quote or the article wrong saying users will have only 4 weeks remaining.
- smileybarry 4y agoYeah, the article is wrong, you have 1 year to associate new custom domain addresses before the option to add is removed.
- UberFly 4y agoI wonder for how many it's more like 1 year to migrate to some other service.
- georgyo 4y agoThey are not removing the functionality for people who already have domains added
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blinkingled 4y agoThey should kill entirety of Outlook.com. It's been years and they can't get the spam under control. Nor the absolutely garbage UI.
- mixedmath 4y agoIf they got rid of outlook, then I'd have to find a new email address to give away to every signin place that wants my email and I suspect will email me promotional garbage (or sell my email). I guess this means that I'm reducing the signal they get for what "good" email is, as approximately 100 percent of the emails I get there are promotional or spam.
- sydney6 4y agoWhat do you mean by that? Are you having spam in your inbox or do mean deliverability issues to *.outlook.com?
- blinkingled 4y agoSteadily growing spam sent to my Inbox. Delivery issues I have not had those recently but 3 years or so ago my job offer letter was not received. I was kinda spooked after that.
- sydney6 4y agoOK, thanks. well, that is indeed quite unfortunate.. regarding things like lost job offers and the like.. Sad state of affairs, i mean e-mail in 2022. But, as an mail-service operator myself, i feel like i can understand, more or less, both sides dealing with the spam issue.
- abswest 4y agoI've been using Outlook email primarily for the last decade. Not that much spam, compared to other mailboxes I have.
- D13Fd 4y agoYou mean the e-mail client that the vast majority of U.S. companies use daily to send and receive millions if not billions of emails? Yeah, I'm sure they'll get right on that.
- systems 4y agocurrently (or before they remove it) custom domains for outlook are locked with godaddy, meaning you have to have the domain registered with godaddy, or transfer your domain to godaddy i hope they bring back this feature, but open it to any registrar
- bikezen 4y agoNot entirely true, I got it working just fine using cloudflare. You just have to create the right DNS entries by hand.
- lttlrck 4y agoFYI my domain started on godaddy, but I migrated to cloudflare immediately and it has carried on working fine since then.
- stingrae 4y agohmmm. I have had my personal domain on google domains. But have had a custom domain email with outlook from back when it was free. Though I guess I'll need to migrate to something else now.
- Neil44 4y agoHe says in 4 weeks but it's actually 1 year and 4 weeks. It was a PITA feature anyway for the family plans, requiring the domain be hosted on GoDaddy. I can't imagine it was a super popular feature.
- smileybarry 4y agoOh really? I thought I just had to point DNS entries and that's it. Bah, I guess I don't mind then.
- esskay 4y agoEw, why on earth would they lock that down to force you to use what is hands down the worst domain registrar out there?!
- tcbyrd 4y agoThere’s actually a trick where you don’t have to use Godaddy. I don’t know why they don’t open this up to users who want it. All you have to do is find the DNS challenge in the query param that’s passed to Godaddy. After that there’s no real persistent connection. Have been using a custom domain on the family plan for over a year this way, with my domain on Namecheap.
- boston_clone 4y agoI’ve been using the custom email domain feature that comes with iCloud+ for some time now, and have had zero issues with it. I imagine many of us here already pay the measly 99¢ fee for additional storage, but I was unaware of that addition until recently. Awfully easy to do, even if you’re wary of DNS. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514
- bluesign 4y agoLack of catch all there seems to be a blocker for many including me
- jkpe 4y agoSupports catch-all now
- thiht 4y agoIt supports it since iOS 15 if I’m not mistaken (last year release) This is probably the best dollar I spend every month
- skinnymuch 4y agoEmail isn’t done on the OS though. A server is doing it. Is there a reason Apple hides this behind an iOS version?
- the_lucifer 4y agoThe user above you was mistaken. You can flip it from the web settings. I was running it on my iOS 14.6 device for a while.
- snazz 4y agoIt’s announced alongside new iOS versions at WWDC and Apple doesn’t break out new iCloud features separate from their new OS feature pages.
- 4y ago
- system2 4y agoAlmost sounds like MS Exchange is being shut down. What is it exactly they are talking about?
- orev 4y agoOutlook.com webmail. But separately, MS is definitely killing on-prem Exchange as well. Maybe not today, but they have been very clear that they want everyone in their cloud.
- system2 4y agoTo be honest I like MS Exchange without on-premise. Email depends on the internet anyway so there is no reason not to use a well maintained cloud service. Makes life easier for IT departments.
- gigel82 4y agoI have a 365 family subscription thing (got it on discount from MS friends) and looked into the custom domain but it was missing important features like catch-all. Glad I didn't adopt it now.
- dstaley 4y agoI was really hoping Microsoft would expand this feature. I currently use a Microsoft 365 Business account for my personal email, and it feels like using a chainsaw to open a letter. One of the biggest gripes I have is the fact that a "Microsoft Account" and a Microsoft 365 account are two separate things, and you can't use a Microsoft 365 Account email for a Microsoft Account. Several Microsoft services only work with Microsoft Accounts, so I keep a @outlook.com email around just for those rare instances. For example, I believe Xbox only allows Microsoft Accounts, so I wouldn't be able to login to an Xbox using my primary email address.
- geek_at 4y ago> it feels like using a chainsaw to open a letter Oh yes this sums it up perfectly. I'm a MSP and most of my clients use either google or ms365 and I gotta say the microsoft solution feels so damn clunky and setting scattered around different domains and services. It feels like it's built around (sub(sub))licenses and googles solution feels like it's built for actual users
- TheNewsIsHere 4y agoThis is actually something I like. Our experiences are the same but my preferences are for Microsoft. The admin side of MS365 is far better to my tastes and use cases than Google Workspace. Not that I enjoy the game of constantly changing control panel locations, but I like where MS365 is headed generally.
- smileybarry 4y agoWe use Microsoft 365 business at work and I hate that exact experience. Every time you sign into a Microsoft service you play the coinflip game of: "Does This Accept Work/School Accounts?" And some of them even change over time! Windows Insider (as individual, not Group Policy-/WSUS-deployed) would not see my M365 Business account until recently. At this point, I just made a "personal" @outlook.com account for the few things that don't.
- mdasen 4y agoAs someone who used a custom-domain-Gmail as a primary account, it caused issues in various places. I think some of the issue is wanting to separate corporate accounts (which shouldn't be leaking and entangling information outside the company) from the rest of their ecosystem. I have a Microsoft Account with my Gmail address. Can you no longer create a Microsoft Account with an outside email address? Or do they specifically prevent Microsoft 365 addresses from creating Microsoft Accounts?
- kornhole 4y agoServices like ImprovMX will love this. They can make any domain you own and link it to your email account without setup on the mailbox. gandi.net gives you 2 free inboxes for every domain you own, but the free tier has limited services and size.
- danielodievich 4y agoMy wife's SMB+personalized email is on the Exchange Online (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...) Plan 1 for JUST THE EMAIL for $5.51/mo. Funny, the plan right this moment is $4.00/mo, I wonder why we're paying extra? Probably not worth troubleshooting though, the service is worth it. Anyhow, I helped her transfer the email from Network Solutions to Microsoft, it was reasonably well documented with guard rails on both sides. It's been rock solid for over a year now. She has a hotmail account for junk and Microsoft account stuff.
- wzy 4y agoFor some reason I have been putting off migrating mine and my clients to Zoho for years; this is the "final straw" I needed to start the process.
- sebazzz 4y agoThat's a bit of shrinkflation. I always wanted to use it, but for some reason they only supported GoDaddy domains which I definitely do not want. I guess it is Apple for me now.
- floydnoel 4y agoI use the Zoho free plan for up to five email addresses (not counting group aliases) on several domains for maybe four years now. works great for basic email!
- kcartlidge 4y agoI pay for FastMail (out of UI preference) but was with Zoho for a while and don't have a bad word to say about them. Especially for free, but even if they weren't.
- doubled112 4y agoI decided I wanted to use M365 and the domain to use it with simultaneously, so GoDaddy was the path of least resistance. I'd have avoided them if I realized it could be avoided. Later I found out that the URL they used to forward you to GoDaddy's website happened to include the content of the records needed in DNS. Others were successful with other DNS providers. You just clicked the link, added the DNS records from the link manually, and eventually it'd validate. Glad to see this won't affect current users.
- 1MachineElf 4y agoCue evil laughter from MS board of directors.
- Mandatum 4y agoFastmail is the best full-featured provider I could find although I wish they didn’t have a limit on aliases.
- westcort 4y agoDoes this mean my GoDaddy Office 365 e-mail is going away?
- AceJohnny2 4y agoTangentially, I've been using my own domain with Gmail for years, but as of ~1y ago, it's been causing me problems. Emails sent from such custom addresses to my domain (which forwards back to my gmail) get a "This might be phishing" banner. See, Gmail lets you configure it so that you can send emails as another address. This required a bit of verification via a DNS check, but trivial if you controlled your domain. However, with the advent of SPF/DKIM/DMARC enforcing, this doesn't work well anymore. My main problem is that my domain is configured to forward select emails back to gmail. This breaks SPF, and I haven't yet found a way to fix this with Gmail. I guess I need to wade through some SPF/DKIM/DMARC documentation. Google's own has not been useful.
- kazinator 4y ago> This breaks SPF The way to do this forwarding would be to remail it in the same way that mailing lists do, rather than a SMTP forward. The sender (SMTP envelope sender) gets rewritten, and so SPF is good. The From: header stays the same. SPF doesn't care about the From: header, only the SMTP envelope sender.
- myle 4y agoHow do I do that in Gmail?
- AceJohnny2 4y agonot possible in gmail. It'd have to be done on the intermediary forwarding server.
- THENATHE 4y agoHere are the records I am using with cloudflare. Ive never had an issue @ v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net ~all _dmarc v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:my@emai.com; aspf=r; The way I have it set up is that cloudflare catches all my email and then routes it to my gmail account. My gmail then uses my email as a "send as" address. No DKIM record is needed because google is the one sending the emails with smtp, but dmarc and spf are needed either way.
- can16358p 4y agoAnyone on that who also is on Apple ecosystem: Switch to iCloud's custom domain mail (free if you already have iCloud storage plan), never look back.
- partiallypro 4y agoIt was done poorly, you had to have Godaddy as your registrar and nameserver. If they'd just include this in a cheap O365 package with the same O365 setup it would be better.
- tyingq 4y agoYou can use something other than Godaddy, though the process is a little complicated: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_personalized_domain_with_outlook_and_office/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...
- inanutshellus 4y agoTL;DR is: If you're interested in inexpensive email hosting for custom domains, consider OpenSRS. Recently Google stopped support for custom domains for free*, so I moved my domains recently for a similar reason. I have a couple domains and they all point back to a few mailboxes. Many of the services I looked at were going to charge me per domain per mailbox not just per mailbox so the prices were artificially high. I signed up as a domain reseller at OpenSRS and pointed my domain's MX entries over to them and... that was it. Super easy. This gets me a mailbox for $0.50 per 5gb per month. I have two real mailboxes, dozens of aliases spanning multiple domains, and an email forwarder (sending to certain addresses emails to both my wife and myself) for $1.10/mo. The negatives: * I've been spoiled by gmail's search capabilities. * I'm not a domain expert and not a mail admin, so I worried I was going to mess it up. I didn't, it wasn't terribly painful, you can do it. * I was told they didn't support plus addresses (jane+homedepot@example.com) so I purged my plus-address logins, only to find they really do support plus logins later. On desktop I use a normal imap client (their web email is decidedly spartan) and on my phone I still use the GMail App. The price beat the socks off of anyone else I had looked at and finally encouraged me to get off of GMail. * I'd been a "legacy" customer, and yes, they backtracked but by the time they *officially* agreed to keep supporting me I'd already needed to make a decision
- drwl 4y agoHave you tried this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052
- inanutshellus 4y agoYes. The thing is, they announced they were "considering" a plan for personal-use domains but then didn't follow through until the switch over due date was almost upon us. They also obfuscated the path to acknowledge you were a personal-domain user. Obviously, they wanted everyone to just switch over to being a paying customer (which is shocking, I know, given that they're a business and all ;D). I figured if I was going to pay, I may as well do some research. I decided that, for my needs, the OpenSRS solution was a good fit and was a fraction of the price (~$1/mo vs ...$12ish/mo?). IIRC, about two weeks before the cutoff they finally and made it official and you could sign up for the personal-use domain. By that time I'd already gone to the effort of finding a new solution and was annoyed at the obfuscation tactics, so I went ahead and moved. ... but I also clicked that box, so all I have to do is point my MX records back to google and I'd be back on the juice.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoI've mostly stopped using free services wherever feasible. You get what you pay for. The only free thing I really don't wanna give up is Google Photos. It's really convenient to just search "health insurance card" and the picture of my card pops up. Likewise for "apple pie", "sunset", "statue", etc.
- zaik 4y agoSurely there is better way to store important documents than Google Photos. That Google is able to identify the type of document that is uploaded to Google Photos is even more terrifying.
- denkmoon 4y agoI'm a happy fastmail customer using 4 custom domains. They haven't let me down once.
- tehwhale810 4y agoYeah, this. I found Fastmail on HN and moved over all my domains and just use catch alls for them with a single mailbox. Works smoother than I could’ve ever imagined, including being able to reply from all my custom domains from my same inbox. Highly recommend.
- fortran77 4y agoThis is a serious limitation. You used to be able to point up to 99 email addresses, from any domain you wanted, to your outlook.com account. It removes the value from this service.
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoThis wasn't a free feature right? It was something people were paying for with 365Whatver packages? Why would they get rid of it? Article gives little/no insight.
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago...so the 'why' is because of spam abuse??
- lostgame 4y agoSo, this won't work anymore with GoDaddy domains?
- cloudsec9 4y agoUmm... "appears current subscribers have around 4 weeks" MS: "as of Nov 2023" I'm thinking someone mathed wrong, but by my calculation this is over a year from now, not around a month.
- squokko 4y agoLove that Microsoft gives you a year to sign up for a deprecated feature.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoI don't think Office 365 allows me to reply as the recipient of the email, unless I create a mailbox or an explicit alias. Are there applications that allow this? In other words, I have a catch-all on my domain, and I get an email on foobar@domain.com. But my login is WirelessGigabit@domain.com. On Office365 I cannot reply from foobar@domain.com unless I add it as an alias.
- tekeous 4y agoSimpleLogin does exactly this, the person emails foobar@domain.com, you receive that email from random-code-123@simplelogin.com, and when you reply to that out of your WirelessGigabit@domain.com inbox, SimpleLogin will send the reply back out from foobar@domain.com. Plus it’s from the ProtonMail gang so it’s reasonably secure and private.
- rcarmo 4y agoThe article is incorrect - whatever is happening, it is only next year. I have Outlook Premium (in a family plan) with a custom domain and didn’t receive any such e-mail, either.
- deck4rd 4y agoHappy Purelymail user for about a year and a half now. Multiple custom domains, easy routing, and cheap. It does have a "bus factor" of 1, though, so something like Fastmail might be preferable to some people.