Email forwarding in Office 365

[DeanAU]

I am reaching out in the hope that some clever person knows a way to achieve what I want from Office 365, but I am fast thinking that it is impossible ☹️

I have just migrated from Workspace email to Office 365. In Workspace i had access to free forwarding addresses, and I used 4 for this purpose. Those 4 were a simple forward to an external email (such as gmail).

When I was in discussions with GoDaddy about migrating to Office 365 I made it clear that I wasnt going to pay for 365 licences for those addresses that were simple forwards, that just wouldnt be cost effective, and i was told that would be fine, i could simply keep them as forwards as i currently had in place.

I now know that isnt the case. Once my domain is active on the 365 server, nothing is available through the Workspace server. But those 4 people have 100s of locations where they have used their email address, and the forwarding no longer works and so they do not get their mail.

I have been given various advice from GoDaddy support, but none of those give me a solution.

There is a help article explaining how to forward to external email addresses, but it requires you to have a separate 365 licence for the receiving email (i.e. the one using my domain name), so that doesnt work.

I tried setting up an alias and then applying the above forwarding method, but that forwarded both the alias email and MY emails to the external address (yuck).

I just want to do in 365 what i have been doing for 20 years in Workspace, but it seems the new technology just cant do it. Does anyone have a solution that might achieve what I want.

Thanks

[PL281]

@DeanAU 

I don't have an Office 365 license so I can't test this - but please try - 

https://support.4it.com.au/article/how-to-forward-office-365-email-address-to-external-address-witho...

[DeanAU]

@PL281 

Thanks for that link.  I actually did find that solution during part of my original searching, and I agree that it does look to do exactly what i want, but unfortunately when you complete the dialog box and click Save it generates an error:

"The parameters passed to the cmdlet represent a managed account, which doesn't match the namespace state, which is federated"

I dont fully understand what that message is telling me, but my assumption is that i am unable to create a new (unpaid) mail user within my domain. The bit about "doesnt match the namespace state" seems to imply that perhaps i entered the wrong domain, but i didnt, I selected it from the drop-down supplied and double-checked that it was my domain. Perhaps that method is blocked when the 365 account is managed via a non-Microsoft 365 server, such as GoDaddy (but that is just a wild guess).

Thanks again for your suggestion.  All suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated.

[PL281 · Accepted solution]

https://www.godaddy.com/help/add-external-contacts-to-your-address-book-12322

This may be similar to the same link I already sent you. If you were logging in as one of the administrative users for your office 365 account you should be able to do this if not, I would reach out to GoDaddy Support. This method actually talks about doing a distribution list to a shared contact which may be slightly different than you were doing it before

[DeanAU]

@PL281 

Thanks again for your suggestion. This is similar to one that GoDaddy support sent me early in this investigation.  It adds the external user to the shared address book, but that is all.  After that you then need to come up with ways to forward mail to that person. Distribution Lists is one way, and so is using a Rule to forward, but either way the Rule or the List needs the receiving email address (i.e. the one that is using my domain name) to be in my list of paid email accounts.  So unfortunately what seems promising initially ends up at another brick wall.

Thanks again for your suggestion.

Unfortunately I think Office 365 just doesnt support this (seemingly) simple and basic feature. I am wishing i had stayed on the old Workspace email system and not taken advice to move to Office 365!!