by Steve Galloway | Oct 23, 2018
This topic applies to Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Business Essentials or Office 365 Business Premium.
User passwords expire on a regular basis in Office 365. Global and delegated admins can make the user’s password expire after a certain number of days or set the password to never expire. Admins can also change the number of days before users are notified of password expiration.
- Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account.
- Go to the Office 365 admin center.
- Go to Service settings > Passwords.
- If you don’t want users to have to change passwords, select Passwords never expire. If you select this option, users won’t get any reminders anymore to change their passwords.
- If you want user passwords to expire, type the number of days before the password should expire. Choose a number of days from 14 to 730.
- Type the number of days before users are notified that their password will expire, and then click Save. Choose a number of days from 1 to 30.
See Microsoft Office 365 Support page
by Steve Galloway | Mar 27, 2016
Office 365 help series – Changing passwords using OWA
Password security
It is good practice to change email passwords occasionally. Sometimes, ComStat may ask you to change passwords if we suspect that a third party has compromised your account. If you have forgotten your password, we can force a password change.
Users are responsible for their passwords at all times. If we force a password change, users should log in to their email accounts and overwrite forced password changes with passwords of their own. Good passwords include:
- 8-15 characters
- Capital letters
- Numbers
- Special characters
Email passwords cannot be changed using your desktop version of Outlook. To change your email account password, login to your Office 365 online control panel with your email address and existing password with a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome.
There is more than one way to change passwords in Office 365. For instance, users can log into http://portal.office365.com and locate settings from the portal home page. Users are familiar with Outlook Web Access, so the tutorial here should be a convenient method.
Read this article first before you begin. Click open each step below to understand the steps you need to follow. If you need to contact us to force a password for you, get in touch with your usual network administrator or contact us using the information on our contact page.
Office 365 Home Page
Using your web browser, login to Office 365’s control panel at http://mail.office365.com. Login with your email address and existing password. Your Office 365 home page looks like this:
Open OWA settings
Click open the settings icon on the right side of the toolbar at the top right corner of your screen. The seettings icon looks like a cog.
Change password
Follow the 3 steps in the illustration below:
- Click open Office 365 settings
- Click on Password
- Change your password and click submit in the last screen
Remember, you need to know your old password to create your new password, so you may have to ask us to force a password change for you. Also, changing your password will mean you need to update settings on any devices that connect to your Office 365 account, including desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Lastly, you may be asked to authenticate your password change by verifying your mobile phone number and inputting a short code which your server will text you, so your mobile phone should be available.
by Steve Galloway | Jun 5, 2015
Update your email account settings when your email account password changes, your mail server or the security settings change, or when you want to customize settings, such as how your name is displayed to other people.
The settings you can change vary by account type. For example, if you’re using an Exchange account, only the Exchange server admin can change your name as it appears to other people. To manage an email account:
1. Click File > Account Settings > Account Settings.
2. Select the email account you want to change, and then click Change.
Update your email account password
If you want to change the password used to access your mail server, follow the instructions provided by your email account provider. After your password for the mail server changes, then change the password saved in Outlook.
Under Logon Information, in the Password box, type your password.
If you don’t want to be prompted to enter your email account password each time you send and receive messages, select the Remember password check box.
If you select the Remember password check box, your account is accessible to anyone who has access to your Windows computer account.
Update your email address
Occasionally, your email address might change. For example, anne@contoso.com might become anne1@contoso.com. You can update the server setting in your account settings.
1. Under User Information, in the Email Address box, type your email address.
2. Click More Settings.
3. On the General tab, under Other User Information, if you specified an email address in the Reply email address box, make sure it’s still correct. If you leave Reply email address blank, when people reply to your email, the address you entered in step 1 is used.
With an Exchange account, only your Exchange admin can update your email address.
Update your email server
Sometimes the server you connect to in order to receive and send email might change.
For example, your ISP notifies you the outgoing mail server is changing from outgoing.example.com to smtp.example.com. You can update the server setting in the account settings. Your email provider can give you the correct server names.
- Under Server Information, in the Incoming mail server and Outgoing mail server boxes, type the server names. The name can be the same for both, but usually is different.
Change the way your name is displayed to other people
- Under User Information, in the Your Name box, type your name the way you want it to appear to other people.
With an Exchange account, only your Exchange admin can update your name.
Additional settings
- Click More Settings, and then you can change the following (options vary by account type):
- On the General tab, under Mail Account, type the name you want to show in the Folder Pane and the From box (if you have added multiple email accounts).
- If you are using an IMAP email account, you can control when items are deleted. Under Purge Options, check or uncheck Purge items when switching folders while online.
- On the Folders tab, you can choose where mail you send from this account is saved.
- On the Outgoing Server tab, you can specify whether your outgoing SMTP mail server requires authentication. This is almost always required if your ISP allows you to send email messages through your ISP email account when you are not directly connected to the ISP network. For example, if you want to send an email message with your home ISP email account and you are away from home connected to your work network, you usually must select this option.
- On the Connection tab, you can configure how Outlook connects to the mail server.
- If you are instructed by your ISP or email admin to change the port numbers or encryption method used by your email server, you can make the change on the Advanced tab.
Exchange accounts have these options:
- On the General tab, under Mail Account, type the name you want to show in the Folder Pane and the From box (if you have added multiple email accounts).
- On the Advanced tab, you can specify additional Exchange mailboxes to open. This can be used if another person has given you access to some of his or her Exchange folders or someone has granted you Delegate Access permissions.
- To reduce the size of your offline Outlook Data File (.ost), on the Advanced tab, click Outlook Data File Settings, and then click Compact Now.
- Security settings can be changed on the Security tab. Don’t change these settings unless instructed to do so by your Exchange admin.
- When you’re away from the office, Outlook Anywhere enables you to connect Outlook to your Exchange account from any Internet location without a using a virtual private network (VPN) connection. To turn on Outlook Anywhere, on the Connection tab, under Outlook Anywhere, check Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP, and then click Exchange Proxy Settings. Your Exchange admin must enable this feature and provide you the proxy settings
by Steve Galloway | Apr 23, 2015
It is good practice to change email passwords occasionally. Sometimes, ComStat may ask you to change passwords if we suspect that a third party has compromised your account. If users do not know passwords, we can force a password change, however you should take responsibility of your passwords and we ask users to log in to their email accounts and overwrite our forced password changes with passwords of their own. To manage your passwords:
1. Go to your Webmail control panel at http://webmail.example.com (replace example.com with your own domain name).
2. Login with your email address and the password if you know it, or the password we have given you. Click open the settings icon. The image below shows you where this icon is.
This is your Webmail account, and you can use this control panel to manage your email and your email settings, review mail statistics, and more.
3. In the next screen check that the control panel is opened to the “Account Settings” preferences, and the “User” tab, and then input your passwords and click save. A time of writing you will need a capital letter and a number in your password. Our policy may change from time to time. When you have entered your passwords, click “save”, which is located above the “User” tab.
You have now changed your password. Also, changing your password will mean you need to update settings on any devices that connect to Office 365, including desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. This process will allow you to manage one account at a time. To manage another account, log out of your Webmail account, and then log in to the next account with that user’s credentials, and repeat.
