Office 365 - Receive email from ISP POP3 account?

seedubya

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New client with an existing POP3 email account provided 20 years ago by their ISP. The ISP supports POP3 and IMAP only for email and cannot forward or re-direct emails.

I need to get email from the ISP account into a new Office 365 Email account. Unfortunately, Microsoft have removed the ability to pull external email directly into Office 365, which I did not realise until I'd undertaken the work.

Outlook rules may be the only option, and they are unreliable to say the least.

Any thoughts?
 
Are these two accounts going to run in tandem forever - or will he ditch the POP one after a while? If so (and I hear you about Outlook mail-rules), I'd just set up rules to copy incoming mail on the POP account into the O365 one and also send out an auto-response saying something like 'Please note my new email address is xxxxx@yyy.com Please update your records/address book accordingly'. I've done this before with Outlook and I have to say - not being its biggest fan - it behaved faultlessly.
 
Unbelievable. What kind of ISP is nowadays unable to forward mails for his customers?
I'd say that this is more a case of "won't" rather than "can't". It would set a precedent and open them up to costs. I sympathise with the ISP to be honest - these legacy email setups are just a millstone around their necks.
 
Are these two accounts going to run in tandem forever - or will he ditch the POP one after a while? If so (and I hear you about Outlook mail-rules), I'd just set up rules to copy incoming mail on the POP account into the O365 one and also send out an auto-response saying something like 'Please note my new email address is xxxxx@yyy.com Please update your records/address book accordingly'. I've done this before with Outlook and I have to say - not being its biggest fan - it behaved faultlessly.

Yeah, it's looking like this might be the only way to operate.
 
Is this client using an ISP-provided email address (e.g. @sbcglobal, etc)?

I'm sure there are a variety of things you could set up to retrieve email and forward or push it into O365 via IMAP (e.g. Thunderbird connecting to the O365 account via IMAP and the ISP via POP3, with filter rules to move received messages to an O365 IMAP folder preferably not direct to the Inbox), but solutions like that are brittle and require maintenance (and may end up lost during upgrades, etc.).
 
Set them up with another desktop client like Emclient, using rules to forward the mail from there. Then when they get to experience how badly this works, you might get more agreement on your suggestion to dump that old email address. Don't make their problem your problem - manage expectations and tell them there is no way to do what they want that isn't a kludge.
 
Eventually persuaded them to go for a extra address that they both have access to and just have the ISP account deliver to that OST file on one of the machines, thus replicating all incoming mail to the other user. It's far from ideal but it works and they're happy.
 
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