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How-to Send email from Alias in Office 365 and Outlook

By January 17, 2023No Comments

A long-requested feature to send emails from an alias in Office 365 seems to be finally released. The feature has not been announced yet, but it’s already documented in the service description and seems to work fine.

This new feature should become available for Outlook on Windows this month and for Outlook Online later this year according to the roadmap. But I have tested both and it seems to work in Outlook Online as well.

When you use an alias to send an email from it will be preserved in the From and Reply to field for the recipient. The recipient will see only your alias and not your primary email address.

Enable Send Email from Alias Office 365

The send from alias option is turned off by default, so if you want to use this feature you will need to enable it in the Exchange Online Admin center or with PowerShell.

  1. Open the Exchange Admin Center
  2. Click Settings > Mail flow
  3. Enable Turn on sending from aliases

You can also enable plus addressing if you want to use that as well. Read more about it here.

Using PowerShell

Make sure you have the latest Exchange Online PowerShell module installed when using the PowerShell option. We can enable the feature by setting the SendFromAliasEnabled to True in the organization config:

1.  # Connect to Exchange Online
2.  Connect-ExchangeOnline -UserPrincipalName ruud@lazyadmin.nl
3.
4.  # Enable Send from Alias
5.  Set-OrganizationConfig -SendFromAliasEnabled $true

It can take a couple of minutes until the feature is fully working in your tenant. During my first test, I could send the mail from the alias, but the reply-to field wasn’t set. The recipient just saw my primary email address.

After waiting another 5 minutes and testing it again everything worked as expected.

How to Send as Alias in Outlook

Your Microsoft Office 365 administrator will need to add an alias to your account first before you can use this feature. Users can’t create aliases themself.

To send mail from your alias address in Outlook is pretty simple. Make sure that the From field is displayed (otherwise enable it under options).

  • Select From
  • Choose Other email address..
  • Type your alias and click Ok

The next time you can just select the alias from the dropdown menu in the From field.

I have tested it by sending email from the alias to Gmail and other Exchange Online tenants and everything seems to work. The recipient only sees the alias address and the reply goes back to the alias as well.

How To Send as Alias in Office 365

You can also send emails from your alias address in Office 365 with Outlook Online. The initial setup is the same, you will need to enable the feature with PowerShell as described above.

Step 1 – Add the From field

  1. Click on New Message in Outlook Online.
  2. Click on the 3 dots
  3. Choose Show From in the dropdown menu

Step 2 – Add your Alias Address

Now we will need to add your alias address. The first time we will need to type the address, the next time you can easily select it.

  1. Click on From
  2. Choose Other email address…

Step 3 – Send as Alias

You can now type in your alias address in the From Field. And when done click on Send.

Wrapping Up

Because the feature to send email as alias in Office 365 has not been official released yet by Microsoft you should be careful with using this for important emails. Just keep an eye on the roadmap or the message in the Admin Center to known when this option is fully supported.

If you have any questions just drop a comment below.

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