Connect an Outlook or Microsoft 365 mailbox

An address on @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com or @msn.com, and an address on your own domain hosted by Microsoft 365, both connect through Microsoft sign-in. Trupeo recognizes these mailboxes from the domain of the address and from how that domain routes its mail.

What you need

Which Microsoft account to sign in with depends on what the shared address is:

• The address has its own Microsoft account (an @outlook.com address, or a Microsoft 365 account of its own): sign in as that address. If you cannot, its owner completes the Microsoft authorization alongside you. They enter the password only on Microsoft’s page and do not give it to you or to Trupeo.
• The address is an alias of your own account, or a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox: sign in with your own work account. Which rights that needs, and what changes in each case, is in Microsoft 365 shared mailbox or alias.

The steps

1. In Trupeo, on the “What address does your team share?” screen, type the shared address in “Team address”. Trupeo shows under the field “Microsoft mailbox.” and “If Microsoft shows you several accounts, choose this one.”. If it got it wrong, “Not a Microsoft mailbox?” lets you choose.
2. Select “Continue with Microsoft”.
3. Sign in on the Microsoft page with the right account (see above), then accept the permissions being requested.

Read the account name on the Microsoft page before you approve. If your browser is already signed in to another Microsoft account, and on a work computer it usually is, Microsoft goes straight through with that one. Trupeo then reaches the address you typed through that account, and refuses the connection if that account cannot open it. Sign out of Microsoft first, or use a private window, if you are not sure.

What Trupeo asks for, and why

Microsoft asks you to accept these accesses:

• Read and write mail in that mailbox: show the conversations in Trupeo, mark a message as read, keep both sides in step.
• Send mail from that address, so your team replies from the shared address instead of from their own mailbox.
• Your name and address, to check which mailbox was just authorized.
• Stay signed in, so emails keep arriving without asking you to authorize again every day.
• Read and write the account’s contacts (Contacts.ReadWrite) and the mailbox’s settings (MailboxSettings.ReadWrite), where Outlook keeps its list of categories and their colors. From the connection on, the contacts your team added or kept, and their groups, are the same in Trupeo and in Outlook, both ways, since a contact group is an Outlook category. The settings also let Trupeo show the colors of your Outlook categories.

Microsoft’s list also mentions mail shared with the account and sending on behalf of others. That is what lets Trupeo reach a shared mailbox through your own account. Trupeo reads and sends only from the address you connect.

The owner of the mailbox can stop keeping the contacts up to date at any time, in the “Contacts” section of the mailbox’s settings: see The shared address book. For an address shared with you or delegated to you from another Microsoft 365 account, Microsoft shows these permissions on its first connection too, but Trupeo does not keep its contacts up to date.

If your organization requires admin consent

Many Microsoft 365 organizations do not let their accounts approve an external application on their own. When that is the case, Microsoft stops at the last step and tells you that an administrator has to approve it.

Ask your administrator to approve the Trupeo application for your organization, giving them the shared address concerned. The approval has to cover every permission Trupeo asks for, including the account’s contacts and the mailbox’s settings (Contacts.ReadWrite and MailboxSettings.ReadWrite): Microsoft does not let the mailbox connect until they are approved too. If your administrator approved Trupeo before it asked for these two, they have to approve it again. The same goes for reconnecting a mailbox connected before then, unless its owner stopped keeping its contacts up to date or chose “Not now” on the address book’s invitation, or the address is shared or delegated from another account. Once the approval is done, start the flow again from the beginning: there is nothing to undo on your side in the meantime.

If the connection does not go through

Trupeo brings you back to the connection screen with one of these messages. In every case nothing was connected, and “Continue with Microsoft” starts again from the beginning.

• “Trupeo was not given access to this mailbox, so nothing was connected”: the Microsoft page was canceled instead of accepted, or Microsoft asked for an administrator’s approval. Start again and select Accept on the Microsoft page. If Microsoft says an administrator has to approve Trupeo, see If your organization requires admin consent above.
• “The Microsoft account you signed in with cannot open this shared mailbox”: that account lacks Full Access on the shared mailbox. “See how to fix it” leads to Microsoft 365 shared mailbox or alias.
• “We could not connect this mailbox. Check that you authorized the shared mailbox’s own account, then try again.”: the connection failed for another reason. Check which account the Microsoft page is signed in as, then start again.

If the address itself is misspelled, correct it in the “Team address” field: you can as long as the mailbox is not connected.

Outlook.com sends from another address

On an Outlook.com account (a personal Microsoft account) whose primary alias is an address from another email provider, such as a Gmail address, Microsoft may send your emails from another address than the @outlook.com address you connected. This happens most often to an account opened with that other address, to which an @outlook.com address was added later. Your recipients then see the primary alias, or an address Microsoft made up, of the form outlook_...@outlook.com.

Trupeo tells you when it can see it: on the connection screen, on the mailbox’s General settings page, and above its emails, to every member, with “Outlook sends this mailbox’s emails from another address.”. The mailbox works all the same: emails arrive and leave. But your recipients may not recognize the other address, and Microsoft warns that replies sent to an outlook_...@outlook.com address can come back undelivered.

To make your emails leave from the address you connected:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft account at account.live.com/names/Manage.
2. Set the address you connected to Trupeo as the primary alias.
3. In Trupeo, reconnect the mailbox: select “Reconnect” in the warning, above its emails or on its General settings page. Only the mailbox’s owner sees that link.

Once you reconnect, Trupeo checks again: the warning stays away unless the Microsoft sign-in, or the next email sent from Trupeo, still shows another address. Microsoft describes the cause and the fix in Microsoft’s article on outlook_… addresses.

After connecting

Trupeo moves on to “Who reads this mailbox with you?”, where you can invite the other members or skip that step, then opens the shared mailbox. It copies your emails in the background, newest first: the first ones appear quickly, a large mailbox takes longer, and you can use the mailbox during the copy.

The name your recipients see can come from the Microsoft account rather than from Trupeo, especially for people in your own Microsoft 365 organization. To change it, use the Microsoft 365 admin center, or account.microsoft.com for an Outlook.com address.

If this is your first mailbox, the remaining steps are in Connect your first mailbox.

What Trupeo will change in the mailbox, and what it will not, is detailed in How emails arrive in Trupeo.