Setting up a personalised email address in Microsoft 365 WITHOUT a GoDaddy domain

Let’s face it: Microsoft 365 (previously known by many other names such as Office365) is a great value subscription, especially if you shop around and take a Family subscription.  It includes the Office suite plus Outlook.com-hosted email (50Gb) plus 1Tb per family member up to a total of 5 sub-accounts – and given the annual price starting at CHF65,-!

If you own a .CH (or any other) domain and want to personalise your Outlook.com experience to be, well, something else, you can do – without having to suffer a GoDaddy experience.

You can get started by reading this Microsoft support page.  It’s barely of any help so let’s walk through it….

When you have a Premium subscription to M365 – as an individual or family – you can onboard your own domain so that it looks better than @outlook.com.   First, make sure you can modify the DNS entries for your domain (.CH or something else) and then begin the steps.

Clicking on the diamond in the Outlook.com web interface, you can then choose Personalized email address and Get Started.  A nice pop-up will appear asking if you have a domain – pretend you don’t and click on the GoDaddy link.

Stop at this stage, you need to go no further.  What you need here is the “mxRecordValue=XXXXXXXXX” (9 digits) value in the URL you just opened.  This number is important as it’s your tenant ID.

Close that stuff.  You really don’t need nor want to go to GoDaddy.

Now you need to get busy with DNS; it’s not hard.  Four entries will see your return to enabling your own domain a success….!

Twostandard ones that you can copy and paste:

  1. TXT record set to v=spf1 include:outlook.com -all
  2. CNAME record autodiscover set to autodiscover.outlook.com
After this, your number from above comes into play.  It’s your tenant ID and is needed in two records:
  1. TXT record _outlook set to XXXXXXXXX (your tenant ID)
  2. MX record with priority set 0 or 1 as XXXXXXXXX.pamx1.hotmail.com
Delete any CNAME called autodiscover that existed before as well as any SPF TXT and MX records.  
If these records did not exist before in your domain DNS, you can go back to your Outlook.com web interface and click on the diamond again.
After choosing Personalized email address and Get Started, enter your domain and go through the steps.  It should verify and become active soon afterwards.  In the personalized email section, you will be able to set yourself a [email protected] (.com, .whatever….); if you have a family subscription, your family members will also be able to add a [email protected] now too.
One last thing before you leave the Settings in the Outlook.com web interface,  Find Email on the left and choose Sync; you can set your default from email address in there and manage the primary alias from a link underneath.
One final tip is that if you have an Outlook client connected to this account, remove it and re-add it; it will then have the fully experience of your new personalized email address!  This also counts on mobile devices, it seems to set up a cleaner version of your new email address on those devices too.  Your old @outlook.com address will still work so mail will still come into the same mailbox…..it seems everything is covered and pretty easy!

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