Microsoft 365 and Outlook mailboxes

The short version

A Microsoft 365 or Outlook mailbox cannot be connected to WorkOrders with a username and a password. Not because it is fiddly — because Microsoft has switched that off. There is no app password to find, no setting to enable, and no combination of server name and port that will work. If you have been looking for the Microsoft equivalent of the Gmail app password, you can stop: it is not hidden, it is gone.

What works instead is forwarding, and it takes about a minute. You point your Microsoft mailbox at the address WorkOrders already gave you, and every request that arrives becomes a job exactly as it would have. No password leaves your organisation, and there is nothing that can expire.

The rest of this page is how to do that, and what does and does not change as a result.

Why the connection is not possible

Reading a mailbox from another program uses IMAP, and until recently IMAP meant signing in with a username and a password like any other mail program. Microsoft has retired that method for Exchange Online — the mail service behind Microsoft 365 and Outlook — on the reasonable grounds that a password sitting in a dozen programs is a password that eventually leaks.

What replaced it is a sign-in flow where you approve an application from inside your Microsoft account, and the application never sees a password at all. That is a better arrangement, and it is one WorkOrders does not offer for Microsoft. So the honest position is that this route is closed, rather than difficult.

You will find pages elsewhere describing app passwords for Outlook. They were written when that worked. Following them will end in the server rejecting the credentials, which is a confusing error to be given for something that is not actually a credential problem.

Forward the mailbox instead

Your company already has its own WorkOrders address — it was created the moment the company was, and it looks like yourfirm@jobs.workorders.nz. Anything emailed to it becomes a work order on your board. Forwarding puts your Microsoft mailbox in front of it.

1. In WorkOrders, go to Settings → Mailboxes. The first card on the page is Your WorkOrders address, with a Copy button next to it. Copy it — this is the one value you must get exactly right, and typing it by hand is how it goes wrong.
2. In Outlook on the web, open Settings, then Mail, then Forwarding.
3. Turn forwarding on, paste your jobs.workorders.nz address in as the destination, and save.
4. Tick the option to keep a copy of forwarded messages if you want the mail to stay in the Microsoft mailbox as well. Most firms do — forwarding is then purely additive, and nobody who is used to reading that inbox loses anything.
5. Send yourself a test email to the Microsoft address, and watch for a work order appearing on the board.

Microsoft moves its wording around, so those labels may not read exactly like that when you get there — the setting has lived under slightly different names over the years, and an administrator can also set forwarding for a mailbox centrally rather than each person doing their own. If you cannot find it, Microsoft's own help for forwarding in Outlook is the authority; this page is not trying to be it.

Some organisations block forwarding to outside addresses

A Microsoft 365 administrator can prevent mail being forwarded outside the organisation, and it is a common setting. If forwarding refuses to save, or saves and then quietly stops working, that is usually what has happened. It is allowed per destination, so the fix is to ask whoever administers your Microsoft account to permit forwarding to jobs.workorders.nz — not to open forwarding up in general.

A shared mailbox or a distribution list is fine

If requests arrive at a shared mailbox — service@, maintenance@, the address the whole office watches — that is a perfectly good thing to forward, and often the better one. It is the address your customers actually use, and it does not depend on any one person's account still existing next year.

A distribution list works too: add your jobs.workorders.nz address as one more member, and everybody who was already getting the mail carries on getting it while a copy also becomes a job.

What this does not change

Replies still work

Forwarding is only about getting mail in. Everything going out is unaffected: WorkOrders emails your customer when a job is accepted, on the way and finished, and when they reply, that reply lands on the job it is about rather than starting a second one. Nobody has to quote a reference number and nobody has to close a duplicate.

What your customer sees

Those emails go out from yourfirm@workorders.nz, with your firm's name on them and your own email address as the reply-to — so a customer who hits reply on something that is not about a specific job reaches you directly, in your Microsoft mailbox, as they always did. Forwarding changes none of that. Your own WorkOrders address explains why the address you receive at and the address we send from are deliberately different.

You will not get two of everything

Every email carries an identifier its sender's mail program gave it, and we remember the ones we have seen for your company. So the same message arriving by two routes only ever makes one job — you can forward the Microsoft mailbox and hand your jobs.workorders.nz address out directly, or run forwarding alongside anything else, without anybody spending the week closing duplicates.

If Microsoft changes its mind

Microsoft could restore password-based IMAP for some kinds of account, and if it ever does for yours, connecting the mailbox directly becomes possible and connect any IMAP mailbox is the page to follow. We are not expecting it and we would not plan around it — the direction of travel has been one way for years. Forwarding is the route to build on.

Still weighing up how requests should reach you at all? How work gets into WorkOrders lays out all four routes side by side. And if something you sent has not appeared, an email did not become a job is the place to start.