what service is connected to the email address "onmicrosoft.com"?

ajetrumpet · 13 Nov 2019

hello all,

I have googled this and I have discovered that the default email address suffix is "onmicrosoft.com" for people who set up an email exchange account. but I've gotten emails from many businesses in Iowa and from individuals as well that come from "iowa.onmicrosoft.com". I assume that people who send emails from this address are windows 10 users. The first time I tried to reply directly to the email I got an error from the gmail server that said "email address does not exist" or "delivery failed". Since then I have not gotten any errors, but I have no idea if the receiver is getting my message. Can someone here tell me what email setup a person has if that is their sender address?

Kari · 13 Nov 2019

Office 365 Business and Enterprise plans allow subscribers to add custom domains. Let's say you decide to subscribe to O365 Enterprise and register your own domain ajetrumpet.com as custom O365 domain, you would be able to create email addresses like info@ajetrumpet.com or admin@ajetrumpet.com.

However, when you sign up and start the service, O365 needs a domain to start with. As you have not added your custom domains to service, an onmicrosoft.com domain will be created. You will be asked how you would name your O365 subscription account, and that name will then be used for your initial domain.

An example. I own a domain win10.guru (Win10.Guru). I have added it to my O365 Enterprise subscription. When I started the subscription, I named the initial account as W10Guru. This created an initial domain W10Guru.onmicrosoft.com. I then added my own custom domain to O365.

Screenshot from my O365 admin panel:

what service is connected to the email address "onmicrosoft.com"?-image.png

It shows the initial W10Guru.onmicrosoft.com domain automatically created when I started the subscription, and my custom domain I use instead of that.

If I wanted, I would not need my custom domain. I could build a website and create email addresses using the W10Guru.onmicrosoft.com address. However, as most business users of O365 do, I've left it unused, and am rather using custom domain.

Short: whatever.onmicrosoft.com addresses are initial O365 domains for each and every O365 Business or Enterprise subscriber. In most cases, they are dead, no website or email addresses connected to them.

Your case, I guess that the real URL is iowa.com, and emails @iowa.com.

Kari

ajetrumpet · 13 Nov 2019

Kari said:

Your case, I guess that the real URL is iowa.com, and emails @iowa.com.
Kari

Kari,

I've never done business with "iowa.com" subscriber, or if that's even a business, anyone that has that suffix for an email address. I've gotten this "iowa.onMS.com" address from industry recruiters, a professor at the University of Iowa and from LG (smart phone manufacturer) tech support. See attached image for LG email I received. This email from LG is different though, as it says "VIA onmicrosoft.com" instead of literally saying "FROM userName.onmicrosoft.com". If what you're saying is true about default email addresses, then shouldn't the email addresses coming from these people read "userName.onmicrosoft.com" instead of "stateName.onmicrosoft.com"? Why is the name of the state preceeding the rest of the address do you think?