Reference Links
- About LuxSci's Office365 Smart Hosting Service
- Smart Hosting at LuxSci
- Written instructions and more details, see the LuxSci member's help article: Smart hosting outbound email from Office365.
- LuxSci member's SPF help
- LuxSci member's DKIM setup help
Video Transcript
This tutorial is going to show you how to set up Office365 to smart host your outbound email through LuxSci. There are only three steps in doing this. In the first step, you're going to log into LuxSci, create all of your users, and enable smart hosting. In your second step, you'll set up SPF and DKIM so that everyone knows that your email is supposed to be relayed through LuxSci. In the third step, we'll log into Google Apps and configure smart hosting through LuxSci.
Step 1: Configuring LuxSci
Step one. You log into LuxSci as an account administrator. Then you go to your "account administration" area. Go into "email settings". Then here, you can choose smart hosting. Here will enable smart hosting from Office365. Save changes. This updates your account so that it will accept email from Microsoft's servers and allow that to be relayed outbound. You could similarly enable this on a per domain basis if you had more specific configuration requirements.
Next, we're going to create the users in your LuxSci account. You go under "users". You can create them individually or in bulk. You can specify how many users you want to create. Next step. Here you can easily enter the names and addresses and passwords for all the users on LuxSci. You can also upload a CSV file with all of their information, or you can create them individually if you need it.
The reason that you must create all of these users individually is that LuxSci validates all the messages sent from Microsoft based on the from address of those messages and there must be a one-to-one correspondence. For every from address used in your Office365 account or every user you have, you must have an existing user on LuxSci. Each of these users have separate settings, separate reports, separate tracking, separate authentication, etc. This is a necessary first step. If later on you create more users in Google, you'll need to create these additional users in LuxSci for their email to be relayed properly.
Step 2: SPF and DKIM DNS Records
For step two, we're going to update your domain's DNS so that all of your email recipients expect email to come from LuxSci. The first step is to add a TXT record to your DNS to specify via SPF the fact that LuxSci is an authorized sending server for your emails. This is done by adding this SPF record to your DNS (v=spf1 include:luxsci.com ~all) or by adding the include:luxsci.com into your existing SPF record.
The second thing that we're going to do is we're going to add DKIM. Go under "administration" in LuxSci. Go under "DKIM". We're going to add a new DKIM definition. You can put your domain name in here and give a DKIM selector, which you can just use DKIM, unless you've already used that for some other company like LuxSci. Create the definition. These get populated in LuxSci so that LuxSci can start signing all messages sent through it with DKIM.
In order to make this take effect, you're going to need to go into your DNS and add these three TXT records. This one, this one, and this one. If you already have DKIM, then you're going to already have a domain key in an ADSP record, so you can probably keep those as is. You're only going to need to add the one new record, which contains the public key for LuxSci's DKIM configuration. If LuxSci manages your account's DNS for you, you can just click the "make support request" button and that will make a support ticket automatically and LuxSci will go ahead and update your DNS with all of the appropriate settings for you.
Step 3: Configure Office365 for Smart Hosting
Here we are going to show you how to set up Microsoft Office365 to Smart Host through LuxSci for outbound email. First, when you log into your Office365 account, click on admin. Next you're going to want to go to the exchange configuration area. So, show more settings, scroll down to admin settings, and click on that, and click on exchange.
This may take a little bit of time to load as Microsoft loads all the information about your account and prepares your interface. Once it's loaded, click on mail flow. Then click on connectors. Once the window comes up, we're going to add a new connector. A connector is essentially a rule that tells Exchange how to deliver email based on certain settings or policies. This connector is going to deliver all emails sent by all of your users out through LuxSci. Click on the plus to add a new connector. Select all email from Microsoft Office365 through a partner organization. Click on next. Give it some name, like LuxSci Smart Host. The name doesn't really matter. Now you're going to want to say when email should be delivered over this connector. So we're going to say only when email is sent to these domains. Use the plus to add a domain. Hit enter star, which means match anything. So this connector will now match any email now sent to anyone at any domain.
Press next. Now we want to set the routing. Where should the email be sent? Click route email through these Smart Hosts. Hit plus, and enter the host name for your LuxSci outbound email server. This will be different for different customers. It's a function of what particular server you're assigned to. It will look something like, email2003.luxsci.com. This number can vary, and if you have private labeling, this could be your own host name at your own domain name. If you're unsure what to use here, please look in our help.
Okay. We'll hit next to save the connector. We should make sure that we always use Transport Layer Security (TLS), so the messages are encrypted in transport from Microsoft through LuxSci. Hit next, and next. Here the connector is all set up. Next it's going to ask us to verify the connector's working. It's going to do that by trying to deliver and email message through the connector to verify that LuxSci is accepting the message and relaying it onward. To validate the connector, click plus, enter an email address to test sending to. In this case I'm going to do test@gmail.com. You can really put any email address in here that you like. Once you're all ready you hit validate, and it will try to send. In this case the validation is going to fail because I used dummy data as the host name. If you have your proper host name in here, use a valid email address, and you have everything set up properly in your LuxSci side, then this status will succeed. With that, your Microsoft Office365 Smart Host settings are complete. As long as you set up everything on LuxSci, you are now all set.
All Set!
That's it. Once these changes take place and they propagate, emails sent by your Office365 users will be automatically relayed through this LuxSci server and outbound into the internet. You can tell if it's happening properly by looking into your LuxSci email sending reports and seeing the activity there. You can in fact track delivery of your messages to your recipients through LuxSci.
