It is sometimes necessary to change a user’s email address, usually due to a name change or change in job title.

When you’re using Office 365 it is possible to change a user’s email address without the fear of losing past or future email correspondence and the hassle of transferring all previous data over to a new account.

In order to change a user’s email address, either the user concerned (if it is a personal account) or an Office 365 administrator will need to be logged into the relevant account.

You’ll then need to follow these instructions:

1. Set up an email alias address different to your existing address. This should be the address you want to eventually become your new primary address. Once in place, this will ensure that all emails sent to your new address will also reach the inbox of your already existing account. Ie if you have changed your name from Jane Smith to Jane Doe, emails to jane.smith@yourcompanyname.com will still reach you, as will emails to jane.doe@yourcompanyname.com. When you send an email, it will show as having been sent by jane.smith@yourcompanyname.com.

You could leave it here, but if you’d rather your new address be the one you log in with and have it show up in the “from” field of emails you send, follow the next step.

2. To set up your new address as your main contact email, log into your existing account and make your new address (jane.doe@yourcompanyname.com in our example) into your Primary Address.
3. Next, set up an alias as in the first step, but this time set up your old email address (jane.smith@yourcompanyname.com) as the alias.

This means that emails sent to either address will still reach your mailbox instead of one of them no longer working. Your sender address will show up as the new email address you’ve created, but by keeping your old email address as an alias you avoid  missing out on any future emails sent to that address by anyone that hasn’t updated their address book.

Because you first created an alias and then changed this into your primary address, you do not need to migrate all email items over from one account to a brand new one.

Note that if you are using the Office 365 account for other Office programs such as Word or Excel,  you will need to log back into the account from within the Office software,  otherwise you may see a warning that the software is no longer linked to an account.

When making changes like this please allow some time for them to take effect.