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Getting Started with Connected Accounts

Office 365 Technical Blog

6/9/2011 4:02 PM
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Getting Started with Connected Accounts
Audiences: All   Author: Darcy Jayne, Senior Writer responsible for Outlook Web App support
Use Connected Accounts to consolidate email from up to five accounts into your Office 365 mailbox. It’s a great way to manage all your email in one place. Once connected, messages sent to your connected accounts will appear in your Office 365 mailbox.

  • Connected Accounts  Here you’ll find instructions for setting up a connected account.
  • Connected accounts are checked once an hour, and any new messages received since the last check will be downloaded to your Office 365 mailbox at that time. Connected accounts are best used to keep track of email accounts that you don’t need to respond to right away. If you have an account you need to see new email from immediately but still want to see it in your Office 365 mailbox, set up a forwarding rule from that account. If you have a forwarded account and want to be able reply to messages sent through that account using its address, combine methods by forwarding from the account and adding it as a connected account.
  • After you have added a connected account, you can select the address of that account as the “reply to” address for messages that you send via your Office 365 account. You can do this on a message-by-message basis, or for all messages. Use the Connected Accounts tab in Outlook Web App Options to set the default reply address for all messages.
  • When you use Connected Accounts, the original sender information is always preserved. This means that a message sent from your friend Sue to your connected Gmail account will appear in your Office 365 mailbox, and you will see Sue as the sender of that message. If you set up forwarding from another account to your Office 365 account, messages may or may not keep their original sender information, depending on how the host of the original receiving account handles forwarding rules.
  • You can add up to five connected accounts to your Office 365 account.
  • Connected Accounts let you manage your connected email accounts from one location. You can tell at a glance which accounts are configured to deliver to your Office 365 mailbox.
  • You can use Inbox Rules to automatically sort messages received through your connected accounts into folders that you specify. For instructions, see Using Inbox Rules to Sort Downloaded Messages in Learn About Connected Accounts.
  • You can add Hotmail accounts, and any accounts that support access via POP or IMAP.
  • Connected Accounts FAQ

Setting the Default Reply Address

To set the default reply address in Outlook Web App, go to Options > See All Options > Connected Accounts.
If you set the default reply address to “Automatic”, when you reply to a message, Outlook Web App will automatically set the reply address to match the account the message was received through. You can change the reply address on individual messages as needed.

Changing the reply address on an individual message

When you create a message (new, reply, or forward), you can click the arrow next to From: to show a list of your connected accounts and select one as the reply address for that message.

Notes about some popular email services

 

  • Hotmail   Hotmail automatically connects as a DeltaSync account. If you have created any folders or subfolders in Hotmail, they will automatically be recreated in your Office 365 mailbox and their contents will be downloaded.
  • Yahoo   Yahoo Mail requires that you sign up for their “Advanced Mail” to obtain POP access to your Yahoo Mail account. Advanced Mail isn't included in the free Yahoo Mail service.
  • Gmail   Only POP is supported for connected Gmail accounts. You have to enable POP in your Gmail account before you add it as a connected account. To do that, sign in to your Gmail account and go to Options > Mail Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
    When you add a Gmail account as a connected account, every message in your Gmail account will be downloaded into the Inbox in your Office 365 mailbox. This happens because Gmail uses labels to sort messages instead of folders. While it may appear as though you have sorted mail in your Gmail account into different folders, it is all still in one folder but each message has a different label.

 
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Comments
    • posted 6/20/2011 9:22 AM

    Great article well writen and easy to understand.

    Is there a similar guide on how to set up Outlook 2007 or 2010 to use connected accounts? In particular I would like to know how to send messages from a a different e-mail account than my user@domain.onmicrosoft.com using the office 365 mail server just like I can from OWA.

  • Thanks, Raggy - I'm glad you found the post helpful.  Your question has a two-part answer.

    First: Check the help in Outlook for how to add an account to your Outlook profile.  It's a pretty straightforward process.

    Second:  Connected Account settings in Outlook Web App are saved on the server that hosts your mailbox.  So, if you set up a connected account via Outlook Web App, you will be able to see messages received through that account and send as that account from Outlook and from Outlook Web App.

    However, if you add the same account in Outlook by going to File/Info and clicking the "add account" button, the settings are saved to the local Outlook profile, not to the server.  So, while you can add an account to Outlook and send as that account from Outlook, the change is not on the server and so won't carry over to Outlook Web App.

  • If you have you Office365 account already added to Outlook then the connected accounts email will also populate there as well.

  • David B and Darcy,

    I think the part that's missing is how to setup the reply-to properly in Outlook.  OWA has it setup and downloads the email, but does that other address automatically propagate to Outlook?  

    Otherwise you have to do a hybrid approach, like having another account setup in Outlook, and manually change the from address, which is painful.

     Mike

  • Hi Darcy. Automatically replying with the reply-to address of the connected account does NOT work in Outlook 2011 for Mac! You can't even manually set the from address to that of the connected account (Gmail in this case). I tried exactly the same thing with the same Exchange Online account (set up to import the Gmail connected account) in Outlook 2010 for Windows and it does work.

    Is that a known limitation on a Mac? Is there a workaround?

    Quoting Darcy:

    Second:  Connected Account settings in Outlook Web App are saved on the server that hosts your mailbox.  So, if you set up a connected account via Outlook Web App, you will be able to see messages received through that account and send as that account from Outlook and from Outlook Web App.

  • I just did this with my office 365 account and it seems the email is propagating directly into my inbox and is a holly mess.  how do I fix this?

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