To set up email forwarding in Office 365 to an external email address without creating a mailbox please follow these instructions:
Step 1. Log in to Office 365
Go to http://portal.microsoftonline.com
Step 2. Go to Exchange Admin
On the left sidebar under Admin click on Exchange
Step 3. Create a New Mail User
Click on Recipients in the left sidebar
Click on Contacts
Click on the arrow next to the + and Choose Mail User
Step 4. Fill in the New User Details
Fill in all the relevant details:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Alias – make this the same as the User ID
- External Email Address – the email address you want to forward the email to
- User ID – The Internal email address you want to forward from
- Password – Not important as it won’t be used anyway but still make sure it’s secure
Step 5. Wait – IMPORTANT!
As with any task on Office 365 you can try out your new forwarding address straight away but it may not work immediately. Sometimes Office 365 can take some time (an hour or two) to recognise changes in the system for some tasks.
Conclusion
Although the process of forwarding an internal Office 365 address to an external email address without a mailbox is simple enough to complete when you know how to, finding the correct section in the ECP can be misleading as there isn’t a simple “Forwarding” section.
This is the solution to a simple redirect. It works perfectly.
However I would like to make it more difficult. I would like to redirect two email addresses to the SAME external address. There is a problem with the second address since the system detects that address and can´t redirect it properly.
Any idea on how to do it?
Thanks
You can instead create a shared mail box (which does not use a license), and you can also create as many aliases for it as you wish. Then forward that mailbox to an external address and turn off ‘keep a copy’, giving you the result you’re after.
Thank you! Exactly what I needed to know. Most helpful indeed!
The first method (using a Mail User) only seems to work if the e-mail message to be forwarded originates within my organization. Mail coming from an external location will get the error “Recipient not found by SMTP address lookup”
Or maybe I’ve done something wrong…
Our particular goal is for an organization branching off a new organization; some of the users are going to the new organization (with new e-mail addresses in a new DNS domain), but we want their old e-mail addresses to forward to their new ones, even when sent from elsewhere.
My mistake, it works fine. We had a relaying SMTP server in the middle which still thought the messages should go back to the old Exchange server.
Thank you, very helpful. it works.