Proxy Addresses

Applies to: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses, Office 365 for enterprises, Live@edu

You can configure more than one e-mail address for the same mailbox. These additional addresses are called proxy addresses. They let people receive e-mail that is sent to different e-mail addresses.

When would you use a proxy address? Let's look at Contoso University, a large university that has a broad alumni network.

Ayla, the e-mail administrator, manages three domains at the university: contoso.edu; students.contoso.edu; and contoso-alumni.com. Each of these domains generates a lot of error messages so Ayla wants a postmaster address for each domain. A postmaster address is an administrative address commonly used to receive error messages that are generated in a domain.

Ayla needs three postmaster addresses: postmaster@contoso.edu; postmaster@students.contoso.edu; and postmaster@contoso-alumni.com. She wants all e-mail to go postmaster@contoso.edu, so she creates a mailbox for postmaster@contoso.edu and then adds proxy addresses for each of the other postmaster addresses as shown here in the Exchange Control Panel.

When you add proxy addresses to a user's account, you are simply adding SMTP addresses to the existing mailbox. The proxy addresses you create are all associated with the primary e-mail address and any e-mail sent to the proxy addresses goes to the mailbox for the primary address. Users can't sign in with proxy addresses because proxy addresses don't have an associated Window Live ID.

More reasons to add proxy addresses to a mailbox

• The name of a person or organization has changed. In this case, you would create a proxy address using the new name so that mail sent to the new address and the old address is delivered to the person's mailbox.
• A student has graduated and is now an alumni or faculty member at the same academic institution. In this case, the domain name for the proxy address can indicate whether the person is an alumni or faculty, as in the Contoso.edu example, and mail sent to the new address is delivered to the former student's mailbox.
• A company has been restructured or acquired by another company. In this case, you would create proxy addresses with a domain name that identifies the new company so that employees can receive e-mail sent to their e-mail address that used the company’s previous name.

Accepted domains

When you use domain names that aren't your primary domain for proxy addresses, as in the Contoso.edu example, you have to configure an accepted domain for each domain that you want a proxy address for. An accepted domain is any SMTP namespace for which an organization sends or receives e-mail. For more information, see Accepted Domains.

If you haven't configured any accepted domains, the address suffix for the proxy addresses you create has to be the address suffix of your domain. By configuring accepted domains, you can create proxy addresses that have the accepted domain as the domain suffix.