For a simple household or business mailbox that just needs to send and receive mail on your own domain, Exchange Online Plan 1 is enough: 50 GB mailbox, full encryption, unlimited aliases. If you want more room, security and legal-grade retention, we recommend Exchange Online Plan 2: 100 GB mailbox, unlimited archive, Defender for Office 365 for advanced threat protection, Data Loss Prevention policies and litigation hold. If you also want desktop Office apps, Teams, SharePoint and device management, the Microsoft 365 Business Premium bundle includes everything in Plan 2 plus the full Microsoft productivity suite. We help you pick based on how you actually use mail.

You can technically use Exchange Online with a Microsoft-issued address, but the address still belongs to Microsoft. A custom domain is what gives you something nobody else can take away. If you ever want to move hosting providers, or if Microsoft ever changes its terms, the domain goes with you. That permanence is the single biggest reason we recommend a custom domain for anyone who plans to keep the same email address for years. And if you already have a domain, that part is already done.

We usually recommend Namecheap for households that want simple and predictable pricing, Porkbun for users who prefer a friendly interface with no upselling, and Cloudflare Registrar for anyone who already uses Cloudflare for a website or wants the strongest possible DNS layer. If you already own a domain with any other registrar, we simply connect it to Exchange Online and you keep control of the domain where it is. There is no requirement to move.

We keep the old address as a forwarding rule for as long as you want it. Messages sent to the old address still arrive in the new Exchange Online mailbox. This means you do not have to update every single account on the first day. You update them at your own pace, and nothing is missed in the meantime. When you are ready, we close the old account cleanly on your confirmation, and the forwarding rule is removed.

No, provided it is configured properly. When you send mail from a brand-new domain, receiving servers treat it with caution until it has a sending history. We prevent this by setting up SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS correctly from day one, and by sending a small number of test messages to warm up the reputation. Microsoft 365 also provides a well-known sending reputation that incoming servers trust. Within a couple of weeks, your domain builds the same trust as any established address.

A typical household migration takes four to five working days from start to finish. Domain registration and Exchange Online mailbox setup happen on day one. The full migration of old mail runs in the background over two to three days, depending on how much mail there is. The cutover happens on day three or four, and the handover document follows. Large mailboxes with many years of history take longer, but never longer than a week in practice.

No. The old mailbox stays live until you confirm the new Exchange Online mailbox is working. Nothing is deleted or disconnected until you say so. If anything goes wrong during the cutover, we simply roll back the DNS change and everything is exactly as it was before. There is no version of this migration where a message can be lost, because the old provider is not touched until the new one is fully proven.

Absolutely. Exchange Online works natively with the Outlook app on desktop and mobile, and can be configured in Apple Mail, Gmail's app, and virtually any other mail client via IMAP and SMTP. The domain and hosting change, but the app on your phone and laptop can stay exactly as it is. If you would like to try the native Outlook app, we can set it up alongside your current one for a few days so you can compare, without losing access to anything.

That is the entire point of owning your own domain. Because the domain is registered in your name, you can point it at any mail provider you like. Moving from Exchange Online to another host is usually a few hours of work, and your address never changes. We can help with the move, or hand you the documentation to do it yourself. Either way, you are never locked in.

Slightly, but far less than most people expect. A domain costs around twelve euros a year, and Exchange Online Plan 1 starts around three euros sixty per user per month. Plan 2 for security and unlimited archive is around seven euros thirty per user per month, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium with the full Office suite is around twenty euros sixty per user per month. For a family of four on Plan 1, that works out to roughly the cost of a single streaming subscription. What you get for that is an address you own, an enterprise-grade mailbox with no ads, and no ongoing profiling of everything you send and receive.

All migrated as part of the standard service. Contacts, groups, calendar events, shared family calendars, reminders and to-do lists all move across into Exchange Online, and are synced to every device in the household. Shared family calendars stay shared, private personal calendars stay private, and access rules are configured per person so nobody sees anything they should not.

Yes, and it is one of the most useful parts of having your own domain. Aliases let you have unlimited addresses on the same domain, each routed to a mailbox, a folder or a group. Use info@ for online signups, kids@ for the children, billing@ for financial mail and so on. Each alias is set up with its own sorting rules, and any of them can be turned off later without affecting the others.