How to set up Email Forwarding to Internal/External users

Hi Everyone this is Prem, I have worked as Microsoft 365 support ambassador. We see a lot of ticket where the users wants to know how to set up Email Forwarding to Internal/External users in Office 365. In this blog I will let you know the same.

We will see how we can setup forwarding of emails from one mailbox in office 365 to other mailboxes in the same tenant or different tenant. 

Same tenant users are the users who are in the same Organization and are considered as internal users. 

The users who are outside of your organization are considered to be external users.

Usually office 365 allows forwarding of emails to one address only, be it external or internal. 

So for us to be able to forward it to multiple addresses we will create a Distribution list and add the recipients as member of the Distribution list. 

We will then use the Distribution list address as forwarding address to forward emails on.

Let see how we can set up forwarding for both the cases. We will need a Global admin account or an Exchange admin account to set this up.

Steps to setup forwarding to Internal users :

Open browser > visit https://Office.com and Sign in with your admin account, Once signed in Click on the Admin tile.

In Admin center , we will click on Teams & Group and then Active Teams & Group :

Then we will click on Distribution list tab and we will create a distribution list by clicking on Add a group :

Select Distribution list :

Give it a name and Description to remember:

Setup a email address for it and then click Next:

Review the group and click “Create Group” to create the group.

After you have created the group successfully, refresh the page and go back to the distribution list tab and click on the group which you have created, we will now add members in it :

Click on View all and manage members :

Then click on Add members and then search for the users who you want to receive the forwarding emails, once selected click on Add to add them in the group.

Now we have successfully created a group and added members to it, we will now use it as forwarding email address.

Go back to the Admin center and click on Users > and then Active users :

Click on the Name of the user on which you want to set up forwarding on :

A window will open from the right, click on the Mail tab click on Manage email forwarding.

Check the box for “Forward all emails sent to this mailbox” and then paste the distribution list email address which we created earlier as forwarding email address :

Keep this checked “Keep a copy of forwarded emails in this Mailbox” to have a copy in the original mailbox and hit Save changes.

This will turn on the forwarding for the internal user who are part of the Distribution list.

To forward emails to external user we will have to create mail contact for them. Then we will add the mail contact in the Distribution list as a member. 

When we use the Distribution list as forwarding address it will send a copy to the mail contact external user.

A mail contact is basically external accounts to which internal users send email every now and then.

To create mail contact let follow the steps below :

Go back to admin center and click on Users and then Click on Contacts :

Click on Add a contact to create a new contact.

Fill the information and the external email address where you want to send the forwarded email and click on Add:

Once you have created the mail contacts as per your requirement we will add the contact as member to the distribution list.

Go back to the Teams and group page and click on Distribution list tab. Click on the distribution list created earlier and click on members tab. 

Click on view all and manage member to add the mail contact as member.

Search for the mail contact and add it as member.

Once done use the Distribution list as forwarding address as we did for internal forwarding above.

These were the step which helps us to setup forwarding to Internal or External users in Office 365.

Do let us know if this helped.

Date: 2/1/2022

Author: Prem

Tags: How to set up Email Forwarding to Internal/External users in Office 365