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Exchange Team Blog
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Sent Items behavior control comes to Exchange Online user mailboxes

The_Exchange_Team's avatar
Mar 28, 2017

It has been a while since we blogged about the ability to control the behavior of Sent Items for shared mailboxes when users either send as or on behalf of shared mailboxes. Today, we are glad to share with you that this feature is currently rolling out for User mailboxes also! What does that mean in real life? Let’s say you have the following scenario:

  • Mary is a delegator/manager on the team
  • Rob is a delegate on Mary’s mailbox; Rob has Send As or Send on behalf of rights on Mary’s mailbox.
  • When Rob sends an email as Mary, the email will be only in Rob’s Sent Items folder
With this feature enabled on Mary’s mailbox, Exchange will copy the message that Rob sends as Mary to the Sent Items folder in Mary’s mailbox. In other words, both Rob and Mary will have the message in their Sent Items folders. We have heard this request more than once, and now we are rolling it out to an Exchange Online mailbox near you! The configuration and behavior of the feature is the same as for the shared mailbox.

Note: If the user has used the Outlook 2013 feature to change the folder that Sent Items are saved to, the messages will be copied to that folder instead of the user’s Sent Items folder. Users can reconfigure this by clicking the Save Sent Items To button on the Email Options tab.

Enable message copySent On Behalf of the delegatorFor emails Sent On Behalf of the delegator:

Set-Mailbox <delegator mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $true

Disable message copySent On Behalf of the delegatorFor emails Sent On Behalf of the delegator:

Set-Mailbox <delegator mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $false

To... For messages... Use this command...
Enable message copy Sent As the delegator

Set-Mailbox <delegator mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $true

Disable message copy Sent As the delegator

Set-Mailbox <delegator mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $false

Note, you can use the Office 365 Portal to configure this for shared mailboxes, but to configure user mailboxes, you'll need to use PowerShell (the team would like to hear if you feel it should be in the Portal too!). For various other details of behavior please see the shared mailbox post. Next question that some might have is: What about on-premises?

Update 4/17/2016: As it stands right now, we plan to release this feature as a part of the Exchange 2016 CU6 release.

Enjoy! The Calendaring Team
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
  • How about to change the default settings for existing and future new mailboxes so I don't need to change the default behaviour?
  • Hi.

    This topic would be nice, but the mailbox owner is really affected if use Outlook for mobile, owa, ActiveSync or Outlook for mac. At least for our tests, not sure if "Mary" in your scenario is happy or not.

    Because for each mail owner sends receive inmediately a warning with this message

    "The attached message was sent a user who has Send-As or Send-On-Behalf-Of rights for this mailbox. Usually, it would appear in Sent Items, but your service is currently being upgraded. The message will be saved to your Sent Items folder after the upgrade."

    Regards

  • Great Feature and looking same for On-premise Exchange server versions too..
  • It would be nice if this "feature" (what was already existent on Exchange 2010 SP3) would also be available for Exchange 2013. Also a possibility to configure ActiveSync read receipt for Exchange 2013 (which is also only available for Ex2016) would be nice.
  • +1 on adding the feature to the portal for all mailbox types.

    +1 on adding the same for deleted items

    +1 globally apply this setting so that anyone who has Delegate Access to another mailbox, automatically has this setting enabled

  • This is great, for things like this I wish there was a "powershell on the web" that O365 admins can just leverage to run these sort of commands.
  • Has anyone tried it? It does not seem to work for us.
  • NIce Feature! I have a sigh of relief :) I was been bombarded by VIP users with this issue.
  • I read this article looking for a statement on what the default behavior would be for newly created mailboxes. Guess I'll find out soon enough by testing, and I can certainly include this in my script for creating new users, but it would have been nice to see the question addressed here. Thank you for developing the feature in any case.