Recently we needed to split out the email addresses of our, now sold, old IT company to their new domain.  For example their it-support@pentangle.co.uk email address needed to be redirected to it-support@colit.co.uk.  Due to the age of the business we had a LOT of old email addresses to forward and we didn’t want to create lots of additional accounts for every recipient in our shiny new Office 365 installation.

After a lot of phone calls with Microsoft it became clear they didn’t think this was possible so I set about hacking around in Exchange to work out how this could be done.  After all we didn’t want emails to have to be processed by our systems before being sent on, it’s just wasteful and means things like our spam filters might interfere with their email and so on.

Eventually the answer became clear and thankfully doesn’t make too much clutter in the Office Admin screens.

  1.  Login to your Office 365 Admin page
  2. Go to CONTACTS and add a contact for every recipient you need to forward email to (only the recipient, you can have multiple forwarders for each recipient eg mike@olddomain.com, michael@olddomain.com etc can all go to michael@newdomain.com)
  3. Expand the left hand nav and find the Exchange admin centre.
  4. Under mailflow choose Rules
  5. Add a new rule
  6. Enter a useful name e.g. “mike@olddomain.com redirects”
  7. Select “*Apply this rule if…” and choose “The recipient address includes”
  8. In the next screen simply add every FULL email you wish to redirect as an word/phrase eg mike@olddomain.com.  You can add as many as you wish in this screen.  Now click OK
  9. Now choose “Redirect the message to” from “*Do the following…”
  10. Select and add the contact you created in step 2 and click OK
  11. Now click “Save” and you are done

Now you can have forwarding without making your Office accounts too messy