Office 365 SMTP Settings

The settings below work for anyone with an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 plan with Exchange Online.

With the settings above, you will have a sending limit of 10,000 emails per day and 30 messages per minute. Which should be more efficient for most use cases. If you need more, you will need to use the SMTP Relay.

SMTP with MFA

If you have MFA enabled for your account, you can’t use your normal password to authenticate the Office 365 SMTP settings. You will need to create an App Password for this.

Another option is to use the Direct Send option that I will describe later on.

Office 365 IMAP Settings

To receive emails from Office 365, you may need to use IMAP. Again, if you are using MFA, you will need to use an app password to set up the account.

IMAP Server address: outlook.office.com

IMAP Port number: 993

Encryption: SSL / TLS

Authentication: Required

Username: <your Office 365 email address> (example@contoso.com)

Password: <your Office 365 password>

If you get an error connection timed out, the port is blocked most of the time on the firewall.

Office 365 SMTP Settings for Scanner or Application

To send an email from your scanner or application, you can’t always use the first method. Not all scanners support SMTP with authentication, and personally I don’t find it convenient either. Another scenario could be that you don’t need to send the scans outside your organisation.

There is also a limitation to this method, Direct Send. You can’t use this to send emails to external recipients. And to be exact, to people who don’t have an Office 365 mailbox (for example Gmail accounts).

Setting this up is a bit more complicated, but once you make changes in Office 365, you can use it for any device or application in your organisation.

1. Get your external IP Address, for example, or add https://myip.com
2. Sign in to Office 365 with the tenant admin account
3. Go to Admin > Settings (click show all settings first) > Domains
4. Select your domain and note the MX record
5. Use the address, like <your-domain-com>.mail.protection.outlook.com, as the SMTP Server address.
6. In the From field, you can enter any email address you like, as long it’s within your domain. The email address doesn’t have to have a mailbox or licence. So you can simply use scanner@<your-domain.com>
7. You also need to change your SPF record, so include your external IP address, which is a valid address to send mail from. By default, your SPF records look like this:

v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all

v=spf1 ip4:10.20.30.40 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all