Hybrid exchange and POP3 setup – some POP3 mailboxes and some exchange mailboxes

exchangeexchange-2013microsoft-office-365pop3

I'm looking to move some mailboxes to the Office365 exchange plan, however I also need to keep existing POP3 accounts.

Option 1: Is there a best practise for this setup? Do you simply allow Office365 to send from the domain, whilst keeping the old mailbox as a forwarder to the Office365 one?

Option 2: Or do you look to go the other way round, point the MX records to the Exchange server, and then have forwarders on that to a proxy domain to the old POP3 mailboxes?

I'm leaning towards option 1 myself, but open to any more ideas.


Edit to add: There's two domains, a .com and a .co.uk with the .co.uk aliased as a CNAME to the .com so essentially they're the same.

The current POP3 mailboxes are all on the .com domain but receive email from both the .com and .co.uk as you'd expect.

Currently, I just need to move one POP3 mailbox to the Exchange (Office365) setup. I could keep the domain setup "as is", and use the Office365 mycompanyname.onmicrosoft.com as their login, and use either POP3 collection or mail forwarding from the POP3 account.

I'm concerned that messing around with MX records too much could cause more headaches in the future with a split setup. I appreciate that the usual setup is one domain per MX destination.

Best Answer

OK, I think I know what your setup is, but still a little fuzzy, I still can't tell if you have an existing Exchange server or not. Unless you keep referring to O365 as "Exchange" which is better stated as either O365 or "Exchange Online" to prevent confusion.

so I'll go with this:

If you point the MX records for the domain (@domain.com) to O365, then you'll need to allow it to an internal relay any user's mail that isn't on O365. This is easy enough: Manage accepted domains in Exchange Online | technet.microsoft.com

However, with only 1 user, it seems pointless, and I'm not sure what the licensing requirements would be for such a setup.

The alternative is the other way around...if your POP3 provider allows it. Bringing email for the domain in there and then relaying for that 1 O365 account over to O365.

These relay options are the best choice to allow for interop and expansion later.

The "cheap" alternative is mailbox level forwarding. This would involve having the O365 account stay with the onmicrosoft.com mail address and then have their POP3 account forward to their onmicrosoft.com account. However, it gets tricky when it comes to SENDING from that account unless you don't care that mail coming from that account will be sending as onmicrosoft.com.

Does that help?

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