Microsoft dumps custom domains in Microsoft 365 Single and Family

Despite the bond with GoDaddy as a registrar, one of the biggest pros for paying (home) customers was the use of a custom domain serving your private Microsoft account’s E-Mail-address.

The change happened quietly but according to an official Microsoft-support document and starting with November 30th, 2023, users will no longer benefit from the feature of connecting their (GoDaddy-) hosted custom domain to their Microsoft 365 Single- or Family-plan. A feature of this was the ability to use a personalized E-Mail-address instead of the typical outlook.com- or hotmail.com-addresses to work within your private Microsoft 365-subscription.

This doesn’t affect current customers and once you have tied knots with GoDaddy to make use of this feature, it will remain unless you decide cancel this connection anytime past November 30th, 2023 for whatever reason. On the other side, this feature won’t be available for new configurations after this date so once you host your domain at GoDaddy and have already connected your custom domain to serve as base for your Microsoft-address, you shouldn’t remove this feature after the deadline given.

The good: You don’t need to transfer your domain to GoDaddy instead of having the freedom to just add some DNS-entries to your current domain registrar, something I always disliked. The bad: Anyone having the need for a custom E-Mail-domain for his Microsoft-based services is forced to transfer-/export his data to any Microsoft 365 Business-plan, starting with Exchange Online. Once the alias stays with the M365 Single/Family-plan and is also used as an E-Mail-address in Microsoft 365 Business-plans, this will result in the nagging question whether this login is for a private or business-account.

Another change is aiming at the cloud storage provided by OneDrive: Starting with February 1st, 2023, all E-Mail-attachements won’t be calculated separately but paying into your OneDrive-storage quota. For example, if you own a Microsoft 365 Single or Family-plan, the 1 TB storage provided will now also contain your E-Mail-attachements besides files, photos and chats as well as recordings from Microsoft Teams. You may check the free space available at OneDrive here while the option for this on Outlook.com is here.

Recapitulating the upcoming changes it seems more than obvious that, with cutting those features, Microsoft is seemingly trying to even push the home users to the business plans. Besides it is not know whether the feature of custom E-Mail-domains (and just one possible alias!) has been widely accepted or not so the decision to dump this feature could also have its simple origin in missing usage. In my eyes Microsoft (and adding the new handling of E-Mail-attachments paying into one’s OneDrive-quota) now walks the way Google already walked with cutting features from widespread freemium-services (here: Google Workspace), seemingly forcing even private users to opt in for a paid business plan after providing and developing the service nearly for free after all those years.

Finally, you’ll still get 1 TB OneDrive, the Office Desktop-applications for one (Single) or six (Family) users and Microsoft Defender for your private subscription but a real bargain with those editions may look different from November 30th, 2023 - depending upon your individual use case.