Connect an Outlook or Microsoft 365 mailbox

On the Startup plan and above, you can connect an Outlook mailbox to Deskwoot with your Microsoft account. It works for Microsoft 365 work or school mailboxes and for personal Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live mailboxes. Deskwoot never sees your password, and you need no IMAP or SMTP settings and no app password.

Connect the mailbox

1. Open Settings → Inboxes, click Add Inbox and choose Email.
2. Under Connection Mode, pick Outlook / Microsoft 365. Give the inbox a name, or leave the name empty to use the mailbox address.
3. Click Connect with Microsoft and sign in with the account of the mailbox you want to use, for example support@yourcompany.com.
4. Microsoft lists the permissions Deskwoot asks for. Check them and click Accept.
5. You land on the new inbox. Deskwoot imports your mail from the last 30 days, and new mail shows up as it arrives.

What Deskwoot does with the mailbox

• It reads new mail in the Inbox folder and turns it into conversations, threaded like any other email.
• It marks every mail it stores as read in Outlook.
• Replies you write in Deskwoot go out from the mailbox itself, through Microsoft, with your own address. Outlook shows them under Sent Items.
• Replies you send straight from Outlook show up in the matching conversation too.

Microsoft asks you to let Deskwoot read and write your mail, send mail as you, sign you in and read your profile, and keep the access you gave it. Deskwoot asks for nothing else.

"Need admin approval"

Many companies let only their administrators approve new apps. If Microsoft shows Need admin approval, or Deskwoot says an administrator has to approve it, your Microsoft 365 administrator can approve Deskwoot once for the whole organization. Deskwoot shows a link for them in the error message: they open it, sign in and accept. Then connect the mailbox again.

When the connection stops

If Microsoft ends Deskwoot's access, for example after a password change or when an administrator removes the app, the inbox shows a red banner with the reason. Replies from that inbox cannot go out until you click Reconnect with Microsoft and sign in again with the same account. Mail that arrived in the meantime is picked up after the reconnect.

Disconnect a mailbox

Open the inbox, go to the Configuration tab and click Disconnect. Deskwoot stops reading and sending mail for it, and the conversations stay. To remove Deskwoot's access on the Microsoft side as well, remove Deskwoot from the app permissions of your Microsoft account. The mailbox stays tied to this inbox: to connect it to a different inbox, delete this one first.

Good to know

• A mailbox feeds one Deskwoot inbox at a time.
• A shared mailbox has no sign in of its own, so connect it with forwarding instead.
• A mailbox on your own Exchange server (not Exchange Online) cannot be connected this way. Use IMAP and SMTP or forwarding.
• Using Gmail? Connect it over IMAP and SMTP with an app password, or set up forwarding.
• The free Hacker plan receives email by forwarding only.