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MailHow vs Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 Business Basic is $84/year with a 100GB mailbox, Teams and Office. Sending from an address on another domain still needs a PowerShell flag and a feature stuck in preview.

The short version

For $84 a year Microsoft gives you a 100GB mailbox, a terabyte of OneDrive, Teams, Word and Excel. That is more product than we sell, and if you want any of it, buy it. What it is not is a good way to run several domains as one person. Sending from an address on a second domain means turning on a tenant-wide setting in PowerShell — and the feature that makes it work has been branded a public preview for years. We do that with a dropdown.

What it costs: one person, five domains

MailHow

$29/yr

$29/yr flat. Unlimited domains, any address on any of them, chosen from a dropdown — and free to receive before you pay anything.

Microsoft 365

$84/yr, per user

Business Basic is $7.00 per user/month paid yearly. That buys a 100GB mailbox, 1TB of OneDrive, Teams and the web versions of Office. No free tier; a one-month trial.

Side by side

	MailHow	Microsoft 365
Price for the persona	$29/yr	$84/yr (per user)
Mailbox storage	10GB	100GB, plus 1TB of OneDrive
Domains	Unlimited	No practical limit
Sending from another domain's address	Pick it from a dropdown	Needs a tenant-wide PowerShell flag, and the feature is still branded a public preview
Office & Teams	None — we sell mail	Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint
Native apps & calendar	Web only; no calendar UI yet	Outlook everywhere, full calendar
IMAP	Yes, with an app password	OAuth only — basic auth and app passwords are gone
Hosting	Germany (Hetzner)	US; EU residency is a paid add-on
Free tier	Free to receive, forever	None — one-month trial

A green check marks a row where Microsoft 365 beats us. Figures checked 2026-07-08 — they change their prices and we change ours, so verify before you buy.

Where Microsoft 365 is better

A 100GB mailbox and a terabyte of OneDrive — ten times our storage, and then some.
Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you need any of them, this is $84 well spent and we are not competing for it.
Outlook on every platform, with a real calendar. We have neither.
It is Microsoft. For a business that has to answer procurement questions, that matters.

Documented friction with Microsoft 365

Every item below links to its source. We list only things that are published and checkable — not rumours, and not our opinion of them.

Sending from an alias requires an administrator to enable a tenant-wide setting, and Microsoft still presents the feature as a public preview years after announcing it.
Exchange team blog: Sending from Email Aliases — Public Preview
Basic authentication is gone from Exchange Online, so connecting a normal mail client over IMAP requires OAuth rather than a password.
Microsoft: deprecation of basic authentication in Exchange Online
In 2023 attackers forged authentication tokens and read Exchange Online mail at around 25 organisations. The US Cyber Safety Review Board concluded the intrusion was “preventable and should never have occurred”.
CISA Cyber Safety Review Board report

Which one should you actually buy?

Pick Microsoft 365 if…

You want Office and Teams — that is most of what the $84 buys.
You need a very large mailbox.
You are running a company rather than a handful of your own domains.

Pick MailHow if…

You want to send from any address on any of your domains without opening PowerShell.
You want mail, not a suite, and would rather not pay for the suite to get the mail.
You want your data in the EU without buying an add-on.
You want to try it on your real domains for free first.

Receiving on your own domains is free on MailHow, with no card — so you can point one domain at us, leave the rest where they are, and see for yourself before moving anything. Start free.

Sources

Checked 2026-07-08. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it — including when the correction favours Microsoft 365.