Office365

This page contains information about using various mail clients with the Office365 email system. The information is provided as is with no implication of support. The information is not endorsed by IT Services. IT Services documentation regarding Office365 can be found here.

General notes

SMTP

Office365 supports authenticated SMTP relaying. So if you're configuring a client on your laptop you can use the same SMTP server regardless of where you are.

IMAP and folders

Whilst Office365 provides server hostnames for IMAP, there is more configuration you need to get the best set up with an IMAP client. For example many clients will default to keep mail you send locally on the harddisk of your computer, or in your home directory if you're logged in to a remote machine, rather than in a folder on the server. So if you send an email with a client that's configured like that it won't be visible to any other mail client such as the Office365 web interface. For the best IMAP experience you should configure your IMAP client so that it puts email in to the same folders that Outlook and the Office365 web interface do.

• Messages you send should be put in Sent Items folder in your Office365 account.
• Draft messages should be put in the Drafts folder in your Office365 account.
• Some IMAP clients (e.g. Thunderbird) will move messages you delete to a different folder rather than just flagging them as deleted for later expunging. If your IMAP client supports that, messages you delete should be put in to the Deleted Items folder in your Office365 account. (The Office365 system automatically deletes messages from that folder after a month.)
• If your IMAP client has junk/spam filtering, it should put any messages it thinks are junk/spam in to the Junk E-Mail folder in your Office365 account.

Basically you want to ensure that all your email is one place and that place is in your Office365 account. That way you'll have access to all your email regardless of which mail client you happen to be using.

IMAP Clients

Users of the IT Services Linux Desktop should find that both Alpine and Thunderbird configure themselves automatically. If not, please contact the Helpdesk.