Microsoft is killing custom domain names in Outlook.com
bigtechwire.com
bigtechwire.com
Awfully easy to do, even if you’re wary of DNS.
This is probably the best dollar I spend every month
Big mistake. Spam filtering on Apple is absolutely horrific. The volume of crap she started to receive was amazing.
Flipped back.
I dont know what Apple uses for spam protection, but its total junk. I could roll a better spam protection myself!
My spam inbound rate has been non-existent.
Happily switched and never went back.
Perhaps I get an extra one more junk every other three day or week, but I can definitely live with that without giving a single penny to Google.
Certainly easy to set up. DNS with CloudFlare and it was able to do it all with just a login confirmation from my side of things.
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.
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 decisionThey 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.
I guess you could specify Google's servers for SPF purposes without any coordination on Google's part, but Google would need to sign the message for things like DKIM. Do they do that for domains that you aren't actually connecting?
Yeah the gmail account shows up in the headers as Return-path.
Google don't DKIM sign it (there's a X-Google-DKIM-Signature header, but that's obviously ignored), so I think it'll still trigger DMARC if you have that setup.
However, their SMTP servers should still reject other people sending on that address' behalf if they attempt to. It'll just bounce and send you an undeliverable mail along the lines of 'You no longer have access to blah@customdomain'
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.
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
At this point, I just made a "personal" @outlook.com account for the few things that don't.
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?
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.
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...
There are around 15 people working in Tutanota, and without Electron they really can’t provide it for every platform.
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.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278022-Us...
What is the feature you're missing here?
You can choose to use a "free" provider like Gmail if you're ok with paying with your data and a lack of features (such as not being able to use a custom domain).
Also by the way, Fastmail is half the price you list at $5/month (might have to prepay a year to get that price).
I know, and I love ProtonMail (for example) for that, but my use would just be forwarding and not storage or access. In my use case it would feel like overpaying.
> You can choose to use a "free" provider like Gmail if you're ok with paying with your data and a lack of features (such as not being able to use a custom domain).
It's versus G Suite Free (which is my secondary, "online name" email), my main (real name) email has to stay at Gmail because I'm afraid of the mountain of account resets I'd have to do. To be fair, this whole value consideration was back when Google were threatening to kill off G Suite Free entirely (a few months ago), so it was paid-versus-paid then.
> Also by the way, Fastmail is half the price you list at $5/month
Fair, $10/month was off the top of my head.
It sounded to me like you were _sending_ email as well from your custom domain, which is (in my opinion) the hardest and most expensive part of running a mail service.
If you're only going to use it for forwarding you could just use something like Cloudflare's service as you previously mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm sure they'll get right on that.
I've been using it on and off since the 90's and it feels like it gets worse every year, the current iteration is barely usable.
Same goes with Outlook. See what they introduced recently: https://twitter.com/DenysVitali/status/1587752974062944256
Wtf?
Teams is just a an Electron (AKA Chrome shit-client) program. So nothing can be done, unless they want to re-write the program from scratch. I'm not saying the current situation is acceptable, its not. But when you choose Electron, you more or less doom your product to having awful performance forever.
did you forget a "/s" or something?
you realize thats just another Chrome shit-client right?
How is that any better than the current situation? Its actually worse, since now that version will get old quite fast, unless Microsoft decides to also do forced updates like Google does.
The main benefits are that the apps should be faster, smaller, and use less resources as they don't include the whole of Electron (Chrome) with each one. So ideally massively less resource usage as so much is shared.
Running VS Code and Teams at the same time, for instance, would ideally use around half of the resources (a naive guess but you see the point).
As you allude to, though, it relies on MS keeping it updated but I would hope they take that seriously as if it takes off then one late update leaves multiple apps vulnerable. It remains to be seen.
But that's nothing compared to "the new Outlook"[1] being a webview around the Outlook.com UI library. It looks really nice in concepts but once installed it just feels like a browser in a frame: there's a window-sized splash screen, the fonts are "browser-y" (i.e.: wrong smoothing compared to Office), controls "feel" web, etc. I usually like Office Insider but once that rolled out I immediately reverted.
1: https://insider.office.com/en-us/blog/new-outlook-for-window...
EDIT: Originally called it "Electron" as a catch-all, forgot about Edge webview.
Either way, it felt really bad coming off the native, animated, efficient Office UI. And I'm usually not against Electron/webview apps.
Also, outlook.com redirects to outlook.live.com/owa ....
It's a pity sweep is desktop web only.
Their email alias feature is cool, allows you to change your login ID retroactively.
I wish they'd take it a step further by allowing me to set a login-only ID e.g. the login ID cannot be used to send nor receive emails (security by obscurity).
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.
"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.
Switch to iCloud's custom domain mail (free if you already have iCloud storage plan), never look back.
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.
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.
Plus it’s from the ProtonMail gang so it’s reasonably secure and private.
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.
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.
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.
I have Outlook Premium (in a family plan) with a custom domain and didn’t receive any such e-mail, either.
Article gives little/no insight.
i hope they bring back this feature, but open it to any registrar
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.
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.
@
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.