Personalize the OWA URL for Office 365

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I have received the follow question a couple of times, so I thought I would write a blog post about it.

If it is possible to add a more intuitive and simple URL for mail hosted on Office 365?

It is possible and described below.

The known URL for Office 365 is: http://portal.microsoft.com – from there the users can access Outlook and SharePoint. But what if end users, just want to quickly access Exchange OWA.

And the portal.microsoft.com URL might not even be the easiest for many end users to remember, when they are used to something like mail.contoso.com.

The direct URL for Exchange Online (Office 365) is: mail.office365.com

It is possible to update your DNS records to point at this DNS record.

Create a CNAME for mail.contoso.com which points to mail.office365.com

Now your end users can access their Outlook Web App in Office 365 using http://mail.contoso.com because it automatically redirects to https://mail.office365.com

The above is the easy way of supplying your end users, with a new URL for OWA (Office 365).

Things are a lot different in Hybrid scenarios, see the article below for reference to hybrid scenarios: http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/officeapps/simplify-the-owa-url-for-office-365-hybrid.aspx

19 thoughts on “Personalize the OWA URL for Office 365”

  1. can use the same method to Personalize the sharepoint and onedrive URL for Office 365
    Ex-Create a CNAME for sharepoint.contoso.com which points to .sharepoint.com

  2. This worked for us until our domain went https. Now mail.ourdomain.com just throws “NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID,” which I thik relates to HSTS. Is this normal in the case of https?

  3. Hello Peter, is there anyway to actually have the OWA on my site instead of redirecting them to office365?

    Thanks in advance.

    • Not if your mailbox is located in Office 365. Even with on-premise Exchange server, it will redirect you to Office 365, if that is were your mailbox is.

  4. I use organisation branding on O365 (Azure). If I create a CNAME from portal.organisation.tld to login/portal.microsoftonline.com, it doesn’t redirect with the ?whr=organisation.tld parameter. Perhaps it’s not meant to work this way, but is there a DNS workaround? DNS is managed by cPanel, so I really don’t want to create a subdomain unless I really have to (all those additional DNS records I don’t need, especially since I’m on O365). Your help is appreciated.

  5. When I try to redirect OWA users via CNAME to “mail.office365.com”, it words for Chrome and Edge. But when Firefox and Internet Explorer tries to login, I get the error:

    AADSTS50011: The reply address ‘https://mail.domainname.com/owa/’ does not match the reply addresses configured for the application”.

    Any advice would be appreciated…

  6. Hi Peter,

    Do I need a 3rd party SSL cert for mail.contoso.com if I do a re-direction to point mail.contoso.com to mail.office365.com ?

  7. my customer have pop3 connection to a public Email service provider
    he asks us to redirect the pop3 access from Mail.contoso.com to outlook.office365.com to avoid any change though all PCs.

    I add the Cname record though their DNS provider but they still getting Certificate error (server name error)

    I need a workaround to solve this issue

    please help

    • Hi
      You cannot avoid a certificate error, if you are using and the application is expecting the name mail.contoso.com, but the server has the certificate with outlook.office365.com.

      You will need to reconfigure your clients.

      /Peter

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