Email aliases on new Office 365 system - is there a definitive answer on the situation?

[Rank_Outsider]

I was previously told by a BT employee that aliases would not be available following the upgrade to the new Office 365 system.  Some of the information on this forum also supports that assertion.  This was almost a deal breaker for us, as we have a .co.uk and .com address and don't want to waste money/time setting up email accounts for both (not to mention all the 'webmaster', 'vacancies' etc. type email addresses that are aliases for 'real' email accounts).

However, following yesterday's only partly successful upgrade of our accounts, the new system will let me create new aliases as well as editing old ones.  I need to know if this a permanent feature of the new system (i.e. can we rely on this feature)?

Part of the problem we had (as mentioned in another post) is that it appears that we cannot have a mixture of new Premium and Lite Office 365 email accounts for the same domain (e.g. mycompany.com).  If that is indeed the case, could we then  set up our Premium account(s) associated with our mycompany.com domain, and our Lite accounts with our mycompany.co.uk domain?  We would then use email aliases to divert .com emails to the .co.uk accounts where necessary.

The two potential pitfalls that come to mind are: (1) If the .com domain is associated with a Premium account, could that prevent us using .com aliases for the .co.uk accounts? (2) Can we change the 'reply to' for the Lite .co.uk accounts to the .com alias if the .com domain is associated with a Premium account?

Thank you to whoever might be able to clarify this for me!

[Stephenc]

Hi Rank_Outsider,

The alias feature is a permenant feature.  However, an alias can only be setup against a domain mailbox.  I.e. you can alias mydomain.co.uk to mydomain.com however it is not possible to alias mydomain.co.uk to myemail@btconnect.com.

1)  If the .com is set as a premium licence then that address will be a mailbox and as it already exists could not be set as an alias.  However, do you mean that you would like to setup non-premium aliases on the .com domain and attach them to the .co.uk?  If so, I can't see any reason that would not work, but I have not tried this to confirm 100%.

If the above works this would be irrelevant, however:  The other option would be to setup lite aliases for the .com domain to one of the premium .com mailboxes, login to the premium mailbox - options - rules and forward the emails for the aliased addresses to the specified addresses on the .co.uk (but I don't think this option would be necessary, aliasing to the .co.uk would most likely work).

2)  Assuming it can be aliased (which should be fine, but I currently don't have a premium account to test with), yes.

Thanks,

Steve

[Rank_Outsider]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for another prompt reply.  You did intepret my original question correctly, however your repsonse brings up a major issue I have with the upgrade process.  I appreciate that you personally are trying to give the best advice you can with the knowledge you have, but why does this rely on you personally having to have to test this using a premium account?  Surely other customers have had similar issues - we can't be the only ones in this situation?  Why does none of this information from previous experiences seem to filter through?

Surely someone at BT must know 100% what happens when a user has mixed Premium and Lite accounts and wishes to keep this setup following the upgrade?  I understand that email systems are complex beasts and that it can be difficult to anticipate every problem, and that sometimes things unexpectedly don't work, however the mark of a good company is how it deals with these problems.  I don't understand how there can be no clarity on these issues after so much time - the upgrade process has been ongoing for a long time now.

As I've said before, I understand that you are not personally responsible for the problems we are experiencing, but I need someone at BT to give me a definitive answer on this - although I thought I already had one regarding the mix of Premium and Lite accounts and that turned out to be entirely incorrect.  This is very frustrating and our CEO is now asking why we're still using BT's email service.

[Stephenc]

Hi Rank_Outsider,

Sorry for the delay, to be honest there's not much in the way of documentation for premium users from BT (that I've seen anyway), so quite a bit of it comes down to what people call in about, I've only spoken to a few customers with premium users so far.

It sadly turns out that you cannot alias a premium domain to a lite domain or vice versa.  Lite to lite aliasing should be fine, but that won't help you here.

The only way I think you could manage this would be to setup an alias on the premium domain to a premium mailbox and setup rules in the webmail facility to forward emails received by specific addresses to the lite mailboxes on the .co.uk

Although its not really an ideal solution.

Steve

[Rank_Outsider]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your advice.  I think that seems to be the opinion of the technical support I spoke to on the phone too, and unfortunately it is a less than ideal solution.

I still find the lack of an earlier definitive yes or no answer on this incomprehensible.  With all due respect to you and the other technical support staff and the effort you put into trying to help users, it shouldn't really have to rely on whether you've personally experienced this situation - it should be documented somewhere that can be readily accessed.  As my experience has demonstrated, it is possible for individuals to make mistakes and misremember things, especially when dealing with complex issues such as this.  I think a lot of the frustration on these forums could have been avoided by the use of detailed and clear documentation available online, and I'm sure a lot of support staff probably also share this frustration.

As one example, one of your email service competitors has a nice page "What's not available?" for those switching from using Outlook to a web-based solution - an up front summary of what you won't be able to do once you switch to their service, which helps users make informed decisions before committing to the change.

[pdsmart]

I find it hard to believe that BT and MS could not anticipate the problems of migrating BTConnect email accounts with multiple allies to the Office 365 platform. We have lost access to admin controls and student course enquiries accounts since the upgrade. BT Tech support are at a lost to resolve any of our issues and have not even bothered to returned calls as promised. Moving all accounts to new ISP during holiday closure.