If you want to send emails from a website mailform to Microsoft 365, you will need a Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription and a custom domain name, and in WordPress you will need a SMTP Plugin. Any free plugin should do, you don’t need anything complex. You will also need to make various configuration changes in your Microsoft 365 admin portal.
The following instructions are for setting up basic SMTP transport on port 25 or 587, with authentication. Microsoft may change some of the locations of the different settings, so if you can’t find what you are looking for in the admin portal, just search for it.
You will need the following settings in your SMTP plugin:
Username: this should be the email address for your MS365 mailbox
Password: an App Password generated in My Signins
Host: smtp.office365.com
Port: 587
Our plugin needs no further configuration, others may need the following settings:
From: If you have this option, it should be the same as the Username
Authenticate: true
To configure Microsoft 365:
Entra ID (Identity):
Go to Entra ID and choose Overview, then select Properties from the top menu. At the very bottom of the page is a link to Manage security defaults. Disable these and save the change when prompted.
When you disable security defaults, this will automatically add a couple of conditional access rules requiring MFA (2 factor authentication) for anyone outside the company’s network (i.e. online) so that will still be enforced. Note, you can’t edit these rules if you only have the Business Standard subscription, although if you search for ‘Conditional access’ in Entra you will still find the rules page.
Select Users and choose Per-user MFA from the top menu. Select the user which is to receive emails, and click ‘Enforce MFA’ even if it is already enabled. You may need to refresh the page after a few moments to see the change, or do it again.
Once you change settings in Entry, wait 10 minutes or so before proceeding – it can take a while before everything propagates between servers, etc.
mysignings.microsoft.com/security-info
Add a sign-in method of App Password, and copy and paste that into your SMTP plugin. If this is not available, go to Entra ID, make sure MFA is enabled for the user with the email account you are targetting.
admin.microsoft.com
Go to Users -> Active user, click the user’s display name and choose Mail from the top menu on the flyout. Click Manage email apps. Make sure Authenticated SMTP is checked.
Go to Setting -> Org settings -> Modern authentication. Make sure Authenticate SMTP is checked.
If this is not visible, then it is probably the default anyway but it won’t be visible if security defaults are turned on in Entra ID.
Exchange:
Go to Settings -> Mail flow (NOT Mail flow from the menu bar on the left) and make sure ‘Turn off SMTP Auth protocol for your organisation’ is not checked.
You will need to add a Connector. To add a Connector, go to Exchange -> Mail flow -> Connectors and choose Add a connector. In your new connector, choose Connection From as Partner Organisation, add a suitable name on the second screen, and on the third setup screen choose to Authenticate sent email by ‘verifying that the sender domain matches one of the following domains’. You will enter *.yourdomainname.co.uk as the domain name.
When you are done, remember to click the Save button at the bottom.
Once the connector is set up, you can probably send on either port 25 or port 587, and the sender domain is not critical – this seems to work regardless but get these settings right anyway. You can also use the IP address of your website instead of the sender domain.
And once you have done all of this, your email should route from your mailform to your Outlook mail box. If you run into problems, you may need to use OAuth2 authentication, which is beyond the scope of this document. There are a number of paid plugins which you can use for this purpose.
If you need help with this, please contact us and we can set all of this up.