OWA URL and Domain

Question

I recently setup an E1 Exchange plan and wanted to try and create a DNS cname to forward from my own domain to the hosted exchange. The forward should remain transparent so as to always show my domain name and never microsoft domain since these emails and users are expecting that all the communication between our users is strictly internal and not on public microsoft websites or domains.

At least that's the goal. But first things first, the OWA url. I tried the good old domainname.onmicrosoft.com/owa but that doesn't work anymore?? Why?

Answer 1

Thanks for the Tip, although I have already started looking into it. I have a couple of options to try, maybe someone might know the answer to this method, if it would work or not. But before i get into that, it seems that my suspicion is in fact correct in thinking that Microsoft intends to push all small and medium businesses onto Microsoft 365. I went looking for Microsoft Server 2019 Essentials and wouldn't you know it, microsoft has completely striped all the SMB features and it's now basically just Windows 2019 Standard Edition but with a 25 user limit. Oddly enough the price didn't change lol. From what I see and read on Microsoft Bloggs, Server Essentials is being discontinued all together. So now every small business is being pushed completely on the cloud with Azure and 365. I have to think about my options now. I am not willing to be put on a continuous subscription for everything that my company runs on. We did not have to purchase every version that came out nor until have I ever actually came to depend on Microsoft support. And the one and only time i called for something the answer is "No it cannot be done". It sounds like Microsoft Support is based in China now too. Anyway.....

So back to my original mission. I wanted to try and have my domain be the one that my employees go to for their webmail. So what I found, and I do recall this process working for simple websites and content, but I do not remember what happens if the contents becomes more complex. The process involved some simple modification to a subdomain from our web server and modifications to the htaccess file for "masquerading" a domain over a website on a different domain. More details can be viewed here...

https://gist.github.com/ScottPhillips/1721489

Does anyone know if something like this could work, at least until the users get past the login page? Preferably it just remains masked.