Ignore MX record and send mail directly to an Office365 address

Question

I'm a bit of an amateur at this so bear with me, here's the problem:

The current email provider for the company only allows a single Office365 exchange account per subscription. They do not allow additional aliases to be created for the account without creating entirely new accounts and additional subscriptions for each address.

The issue is this account has been in use for some time, so I'd rather not disrupt the set up by deleting the account and change it to a non-exchange IMAP account.

My solution to this has been to register the company domain with another email provider which allows me to create unlimited aliases and have them forward onto the main office365 exchange account.

That's all fine, the problem I've run into is that while both of these email providers are active on the domain simultaneously, I cannot receive email at one or the other depending on the priority of the MX records. This makes perfect sense, as obviously there can be only 1 valid email provider at a time. This causes an issue however as forwarding from provider1@domain.com to provider2@domain.com as the MX records loop it back to 'provider1'

So What I'm looking for is a way to send an email directly to provider2@domain.com on the office 365 exchange and bypass the MX record, so I can set up forwarding on the higher priority provider that all goes into the original address. I hope this makes sense

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Non-answer converted to edit

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I understand what you're saying about all of this - My explanation was probably lacking due to my lack of knowledge so allow me to clarify.

I do not have access to any administrative controls on the office 365 account - I had already tried to add aliases and additional addresses myself to no avail as all of these options have been removed from the Office365 account provided to me by the 3rd party company. My assumption is they control the admin account and somehow hand out sub-accounts to their customers. I must spent several hours of my life on the support line with them to try and get to the bottom of it, all responses coming back as 'if you want addtional addresses, you need to buy additional mailboxes for them as this is microsoft's policy with us'. However true this may be is a hypothetical discussion if they aren't willing to compromise on it.

Just to make sure I haven't gone crazy and got that wrong, this is the screen I am presented with on logging in: https://i.stack.imgur.com/sw01R.jpg As you can see, no Admin options present at all.

When I say IMAP mailbox I simply mean an alternate provider that does not provide a microsoft exchange service, forgive my incorrect terminology confusing things.

So basically this leads me back to square one. I cannot create any additional mailboxes without wiping the office365 account and switching to the provider's free non-exchange mailbox service which is not ideal. I was hoping there would be a workaround for this by forwarding into the current exchange account while maintaining email addresses of the same domain (my manager has decided that any subdomains would look unprofessional), I thought it would be quite straightforward.

Again thank for taking the time to reply to my issue, but unfortunately that doesn't appear to be an option for me.

Judging by some of the other responses too it seems I may have to go the scorched earth route and just delete the exchange account and switch to their free service, unless there are any other suggestions.

Answer 1

You are mixing up quite a lot of things here.

The current email provider for the company only allows a single Office365 exchange account per subscription

This is not how Office 365 licensing works. There are two options: 1. You subscribe to your licenses directly at Microsoft or office365.com. 2. You buy license subscriptions from Microsoft partners, register them in the VLSC and transfer them to Office 365.

Having said that, your email provider is Microsoft and only they make the rules!

On a side note: If you are not paying exactly the prices shown on office365.com, or less if you get your licenses from a licensed Microsoft partner.

The issue is this account has been in use for some time, so I'd rather not disrupt the set up by deleting the account and change it to a non-exchange IMAP account.

It would be helpful to know what type of email address you are talking about, but I will just assume it's a common addres like info@…. Exchange mailboxes will always be Exchange mailboxes. IMAP is just a protocol.

My solution to this has been to register the company domain with another email provider which allows me to create unlimited aliases and have them forward onto the main office365 exchange account.

Please consider my advice first:

Office 365 allows you to create a shared mailbox. To me it sounds that this is exactly what you want:

Shared mailboxes make it easy for a specific group of people to monitor and send email from a common account, like public email addresses, such as info@contoso.com or contact@contoso.com. When a person in the group replies to a message sent to the shared mailbox, the email appears to be from the shared mailbox, not from the individual user.
Source: Create and use shared mailboxes in Office 365

They are free. Just log on with your administrative Office 365 account and follow the steps (I quote again)

1. Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account.
2. Go to the Office 365 admin center.
3. Go to Groups - Shared Mailboxes.
4. Click or tap the Add a mailbox button.
5. On the Create a shared mailbox wizard page, enter a shared mailbox name and choose an email address for the shared mailbox.
6. Under Add members, start typing the names of the people you want to add to the shared mailbox, and select them to add them to the list.
7. Once you're done adding members, click or tap Save to create your shared mailbox.

You do not even need to configure your users Outlook accounts:

If you have permissions to a shared mailbox, the shared mailbox will automatically display in your Folder pane in Outlook.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Open-and-use-a-shared-mailbox-in-Outlook-2013-d94a8e9e-21f1-4240-808b-de9c9c088afd#__toc374015663