Want more control over Sent Items when using shared mailboxes?
Published Mar 03 2015 07:35 AM 575K Views

Edit 6/15/2015: We are starting to make this feature available again in Office 365. Note that the new shared mailbox Sent Items behavior is disabled by default. If you want to enable it for your users, you can do so by using cmdlets mentioned below. Additionally, we are still on track to ship this to our on-premises customers in Exchange 2013 CU9, as mentioned before.

Whether a mailbox is used by multiple users as a collaborative tool or a communication gateway to customers, retaining a record of emails sent from a shared mailbox remains an important business requirement. In Exchange 2010, there was a way to configure this behavior, but we did not have this feature starting with Exchange 2013. Our customers have told us that a shared mailbox should keep a copy of emails sent from the mailbox by all members of the mailbox in its own Sent Items folder. We have taken that feedback and decided to make some changes to how sent mails are handled for shared mailboxes. We are excited to announce that once this feature is enabled for you (see below), by default all shared mailboxes will retain a copy of emails sent from the mailbox. You will no longer have to figure out which mailbox member sent an email as the shared mailbox or on behalf of it.

How does it work?

Emails can be sent as the shared mailbox itself or on behalf of it by member(s) of the mailbox, assuming proper permissions have been granted. This feature is designed to retain a copy of an email sent from the shared mailbox in the Sent Items folder of the shared mailbox. The same behavior can be expected for emails sent on behalf of the shared mailbox, when configured to do so. A copy of the sent mail will also reside in the Sent Items folder of the member’s personal 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.

Administrators have control over this feature for either mails Sent As or Sent on Behalf of a shared mailbox. The table below summarizes where sent mails reside when members of a shared mailbox send mail from the shared mailbox.
User Mailbox Shared Mailbox Sent Items
Exchange 2010 Exchange 2010 Controlled through settings in KB2632409
Exchange 2010 Exchange 2013 (any version) Controlled through settings in KB2632409
Exchange 2013 CU9 (or newer) Office 365 Exchange 2010 The sent mail will be delivered to both the Inbox of the shared mailbox as an email attachment* and to the user mailbox' sent items
Exchange 2013 CU9 (or newer) Office 365 Exchange 2013 CU9 (or newer) Office 365 The sent mail will be delivered to the Sent Items folder of shared mailbox and to the user mailbox' sent items
*In a scenario where the user’s mailbox is on an Exchange 2013 CU9 server (or an Exchange 2013 without CU9 installed) and the shared mailbox is on an Exchange 2010 server, the shared mailbox will get an email message that looks like the following: image This behavior will continue until the shared mailbox is moved to an Exchange 2013 CU9 server. Because this can happen even between Exchange 2013 servers (pre-CU9 and CU9), you might want to wait in turning the feature on for your on-premises deployment until you have completely rolled out Exchange 2013 CU9 to all of your servers.

Who can use this feature?

The feature is going to be available to all customers with shared mailboxes in Office 365 (phased rollout starting on 6/15/2015), as well as our on-premises customers (starting with Exchange 2013 CU9).

Note: if after installation of Exchange 2013 CU9 in an on-premises environment you do not see the new CMDlet parameters, you should run /preparead explicitly with CU9 setup.

How do I enable/disable this feature?

In Office 365 and Exchange 2013 CU9, this feature is disabled by default.

Enable the feature

In Office 365, using the Admin portal, you can select your shared mailbox by going to Groups > Shared mailboxes first: Then Edit the Sent items copy status of the mailbox: Using PowerShell, for emails Sent As the shared mailbox:

set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $True

For emails Sent On Behalf of the shared mailbox:

set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $True

Disable the feature

For messages Sent As the shared mailbox:

set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $False

For emails Sent On Behalf of the shared mailbox:

set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $False

What else do I need to know?

  • The administrator for your organization has to create the shared mailbox and add you to it as an user, before you can use it.
  • If you are an Office 365 Small Business administrator, see Create and use shared mailboxes. If you are an administrator for a different version of Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange administrator, see the TechNet article Create a Shared Mailbox.
  • If you are currently using a client registry key to duplicate messages sent from a shared mailbox to a sent items folder of the sender, you should remember to remove client registry keys if you enable this feature server side. If you do not remove client registry keys, you could see duplicate messages in Sent Items folders (one created by client registry keys and one by the server).
  • If one of the transport rules prevents messages larger than certain size and the message being sent is over that size, then the message will not be delivered to the its original recipient and will also not be copied to the sent items of the shared mailbox.
Philip Loh
67 Comments
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Is there any update when the new released Cmdlet works?
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Is there any update on whether or not this feature is available for Exchange Online customers? Before I troubleshoot a test shared mailbox I've created, I want to make sure whether or not I should be expecting replies to items in the shared mailbox should

have a copy of the message appear in the shared mailbox's sent items folder.

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So it's been a month,

What is the latest news regarding this featire ?

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.... And also no response yet if this works in online mode too....
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@FrancWest: the feature will work for both online and cashed mode, correct (or in OWA, for that matter).

@Daniel Be: In order to not interfere with each other, you are right - if you want to rely on the new functionality, you should remove the client registry keys.

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Does this feature also work with user mailboxes & does it also work with linked mailboxes with Exchange in a resource forest?
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@Nino: wil this only work with shared mailboxes? What about Delegates with default send on behalf permissions?


Exchange 2010 Set-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration works with shared mailboxes and delegates using send as / send on behalf. All my customers also want this functionality with Exchange 2013.


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I am also wondering about the delegatesentitemsstyle reg key. I have this workaround in place for alot of users and have even pushed group policy for an entire terminal server (although the workaround seems to break moving the message from the outbox to

the sent items folder). It would be nice to know if I have to remove the key on all the workstations and the terminal server.

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(This comment has been deleted per user request)
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Wonderful! now let us open shared mailboxes (and calendars) from ActiveSync devices and I promise to never ask for any other feature anymore!! :)
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@dirkverhagen123 and @AdriaanW1: this feature works only in shared mailboxes as of now.

@AdriaanW1: That is the general ship schedule that we have been in, to release quarterly, but we cannot commit to a date.

@verypsb: there is no change in how Deleted Items work here; majority of our customers told us about needs around sent Items and that is what we have addressed with this particular feature.

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I agree with several post below that the need to have deleted items would be a benefit as well. The other comment was on accessing shared or public folders via active sync would be big benefit to end users.
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Please tell me that you meant CU8 not CU9??? Otherwise that just shows how little you care about the on-prem product vs Office 365 if we're on CU7 yet 365 has functionality already that's due in CU9.
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@Brent Alinger [MSFT] - Thanks for the clarification...seems reasonable.
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@ Ash12345678 - New features in the service will almost always precede the Enterprise release. That is by design as we rely upon Office 365 for large scale validation of code changes in the real world and "field testing". The feature is not yet available

in Office 365 and CU8 is due out shortly that's why it is not shipping in CU8. We are not holding this back because we don't care. Quite the opposite is true. We want to make certain it doesn't cause problems for Enterprise customers. In Office 365 we have

the ability to turn features on and then turn them off immediately or quickly resolve them if there is a problem. The feature is currently scheduled to light up in Office 365 in the same quarterly cycle in which CU9 arrives. That is the cadence that everyone

should expect. We have heard from Enterprise customers that they don't want updates more frequently than quarterly. So by all accounts the feature will arrive as quickly as customers have indicated they want to consume it.

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I have a user who has been receiving the following email for the past week every time she sends and email from the shared mailbox: "The attached message was sent by a member of this shared mailbox. Usually, it would appear in Sent Items, but your service

is currently being upgraded. Things will be back to normal after the upgrade."


How long is this upgrade supposed to take?!

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"A copy of the sent mail will also reside in the Sent Items folder of the member’s personal mailbox."


Will there be an option for users to store messages Sent As the Shared mailbox in the sent folder of the shared mailbox only and NOT in the user's personal mailbox? Specifically, we want to be able to have any messages that are Sent As the shared mailbox to

remain in that shared mailbox's sent folder only.


Also, is there an approximate date on when this feature will be released?


Thanks!

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Other than that - thanks for bringing this much needed feature.
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I just did some quisk tests and it doesnt seem to work (yet?)
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@ Ash12345678: We in fact mean CU9. Sorry, this did not make it into CU8. We lock CUs for changes quite a bit before the release to not introduce possible destabilization in what we will ship and let the code run in testing longer unchanged. I totally

understand that you really needed this yesterday, though...


@Grzegorz Wierzbicki: Yes you are correct; the CMDlets are there but the feature is not quite turned on just yet. Thanks for calling that out. I made an edit to the post accordingly and we will update as the feature turns on.

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What will happen if registry keys are not removed once this feature goes live ?
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Can't wait for this feature to come out!!
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...and must DelegateSentItemsStyle key be removed?
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So if I understand correctly, you don't need to be in Cached Mode anymore in order to have this working (see

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2703723/en-us), like it was with Exchange 2010? This is also functional in online mode?

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We're curious about what the answer of MS will be to the question from dirkverhagen123.... Hope there will be no difference between mailboxes of type shared and those of type user.

And: CU9 will be released at the end of june. Am I right?

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Great but a little late!
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Exchange 2013 CU9??!!

Where is CU8?

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So if I understand correctly, you don't have to be running in Cached Mode anymore? This feature now also works with online mode?
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This is not working in our Office 365 environment. I've put up a post here -

http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/158/t/297906.aspx

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Can you do that with the delete as well

keep a copy in the delete of the shared mailbox ?

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Does it work only with shred mailboxes? Many miss this function also in user mailboxes.
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Will this work if access to the shared mailbox is granted via security group memberships as opposed to individual user? We have over 1,000 shared mailboxes and using groups has proven to be the best way to manage and reconcile access to these shared resources,

particularly for the level one support tier.

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Wil this work in cached mode and online mode ?
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Awesome work guys - this is a great feature that many of our customers use, and its good to see it's on the road map for coming back.
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Perfect but too late...:D
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Is there an easy way to tell if a mailbox has been configured as sendas or sendonbehalfto by default?
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When will this update be available? We have implemented a shared mailbox on Exchange 2013 and would love the ability for sent items to show in the shared mailbox sent items folder. Right now we have to setup a rule in Outlook to copy a version of the sent

email from the users folder to the shared mailbox folder.

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Thanks for the updates and keeping the community in the loop.


Do you have an expected ETA for deployment of this feature in O365?

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What date will this be enabled in O365?
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I would like an answer to @FrancWest's question as well.
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So is there a workaround in transport rules?



I would gladly like to create transport rules where sender is sales and goes outside organization to copy massege to sent itemes (since sales is shared mailbox) but that is also not possible as far as i see.... Exchange 2010 is sooooo much better product than

2013.

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Hi Paul, thanks for sharing this in advance on the change going live. Are you able to give any indication of when we can expect to see this in Europe? We've always made people add Shared Mailboxes as 'Additional Account' rather than 'Additional Mailboxes'

in Outlook because of the extra features (signatures, Sent/Deleted Items etc) but have found this causes terrible problems with AutoDiscover when migrating to a hybrid Exchange Online setup. We might now ask all of our Outlook users (5k) to remove their additional

accounts and re-add their shared mailboxes using the additional mailbox method. Do you have any opinion on this? Are additional mailboxes in Outlook the long term solution that we should be trying to move to?

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What date will this go live in O365?
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We are actually testing it in an hybrid environement and getting this message in return of an email sent from a shared mailbox :


"The attached message was sent by a member of this shared mailbox. Usually, it would appear in Sent Items, but your service is currently being upgraded. Things will be back to normal after the upgrade."


The mailbox and the shared mailbox are both on O365 already.


Does this means Microsoft's pushing it already?


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@Nino Bilic "@verypsb: there is no change in how Deleted Items work here; majority of our customers told us about needs around sent Items and that is what we have addressed with this particular feature."


Are you kidding me?? What's the point of a collaborative email box if deleted or sent items are being stored in the user's personal mailbox?? The logic of this "functionality" is completely stupid. We've been using the work-around registry settings to store

Shared Mailbox items (in cached mode) in the PROPER place for years now because of this. And there are TONS of problems using cached mode for Shared Mailboxes. Please fix the deleted issue as well, ASAP. And please don't use the excuse that your customer's

haven't asked for it. There's no legitimate way for your customers to talk to the developers, only low level support technicians.

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Seeing this behavior in Office 365 today

http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/158/t/318175.aspx

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This started to work today on a couple of tenants I created. I sent test emails from OWA as the shared mailbox and they appeared both in my sent items folder, as well as in the sent items folder of the shared mailbox.


There was nothing I had to do to enable this feature.


Thank you, developers!

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It's one of the features we are waiting for before we can migrate to Ex2013, but we really need the same behavior for normal mailboxes that have configured delegates with send-on-behalf permissions. And of course a same kind of setting for deleted items

should be nice.

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It's one of the features we are waiting for before we can migrate to Ex2013, but we really need the same behavior for normal mailboxes that have configured delegates with send-on-behalf permissions. And of course a same kind of setting for deleted items

should be nice.

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If just it was possible to do the same for deleted items in shared mailboxes (besides the DelegateWasteBasketStyle which causes a lots of other troubles :)
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