The GuruXP Blog

One of the functionality that Outlook Web App brings us is the ability to connect external mail accounts like a gmail.com one to our interface, so we can send and receive mails from it using our Outlook Web App interface, wich is specially usefull for those who think like me that some webmail interfaces are not the way wich should be, or are not functional or intuitive like the one that Office365 offers us.

So what do we need? very simple:

• An active Office365 subscription with Exchange Online included.
• Username and Password of the account to be connected (generally the username is the email address)

If the mail server of the account to be connected has the capacity to provide  the autodiscover values for mail programs, then we shouldn´t have any problems and have the need of anything else.

So lets get it working:

1. First of all Acces our OWA inside Office365.
2. Click on where it says «Outlook«:
   
3. Click on the little gear located on the upper right side and then click on «options«:

   

4. Then click on «Connected Accounts» and then on the «+» button:

   

5. Type in the username and password of the account to connect and then click on «Next«, This will validate the credentials and add the account to the pannel:

   

6. Once the account has been validated double click on the account to configure the name we want to show up on outgoing mails sent using this account:

   

7. If we take a look, just after the list of the connected accounts, we will have a little droplist where we can select the address to reply from by default, but we can also select the default value to let the system to use the account to reply to wich received the mail:
   
8. Once the connected account has been configured, go to «Outlook» and observe when typing a new mail we´ll have a new field available called «From:» where we can select the Office365 account or the recently connected account we´ve added to send the new mail:
   

Enjoy it.