Forum Discussion
Mail enabled AD accounts
I have a question about email delivery to Mail enabled AD accounts. I am aware that these types of accounts are useful when you need to provide an external person like a contractor a login but don't want to provide them with a mailbox. You can add their external email address to the email field in Entra but they login with your companies UPN. Apparently there is also a license saving here as you dont need to assign them an E5
My questions are:
If I put their UPN as the recipient of an email and send it will EXO fail to deliver it since they don't have an EXO mailbox?
Or will it deliver to the external mail address set in the mail address field in their user account?
How does advanced features like purview etc work if they don't have an E5?
What's the process to create one of these mail enabled users?
UPN value does not affect email delivery, the external email address property is what you need to configure in this scenario. In general, it should match the PrimarySMTPAddress value, but that's not required. And unlike the "regular user" scenario, you do not want to have the UPN match with the email address value here (as the UPN is inherently "internal" value). If you configure the mail user with an email address that matches any verified domain, EXO will indeed attempt delivery internally and it might fail (depending on few additional factors).
As mail users are EXO objects, you need to create/manage them via the Exchange tools, either the EAC or PowerShell.
