Correctly use shared mailboxes

[servierem]

Hello,

I'm part of the IT department of a pretty big company (1k+ employees in total), and we are trying to ease our life with the mailbox setup process on the computers.

We have recently found the "shared mailboxes" thing and delegations and tried that for our department mailboxes (ie. email address removed for privacy reasons, email address removed for privacy reasons, ...). It's great that it adds automaticaly the mailboxes to Outlook without us having to type a password, but there are still parts we need to do manually or things that are impossible that way :

 - Shared email doesn't automaticaly appear in "From:" menu when typing an email. I know you "just" have to add it via the "Other address" option, but it's time consuming and explaining employees how to do it is a No because most of them they wouldn't (want to) understand anyway.

 - Emails sent with the shared email are being stored in the "Sent items" folder of the users email (If I send an email with email address removed for privacy reasons it'll be stored in the "Sent items" folder of email address removed for privacy reasons). Again, I know you can change that in regedit but once again, time consuming and we can't think of pushing the reg key through AD because not all our agences have one.

 - You can't preselect a signature for the shared mailbox (With a mailbox added the "normal" way, you can set in the option that when you switch to email address removed for privacy reasons it'll automatically insert/update the signature in the email body), the mail account doesn't appear in the list. This is blocking because we sometimes send communications where we don't want our name to appear but the department so it gives it a more "official" impression.

We have stopped using that because of these reasons but on the left hand we now have to manually install each mailbox when somebody uses a new computer..

Could you give us some advices ? How do you do in your own company to solve these issues ?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

So here's the thing. You can either have the shared mailbox automatically appear in Outlook, with limited functionality, or you can add it manually and use the full feature set. If you want to use features such as autoreplies, Inbox rules, signatures and so on, the second method is recommended. Here are step-by-step instructions you can follow to achieve it: https://www.michev.info/Blog/Post/3567/how-to-add-a-shared-mailbox-as-additional-account-in-outlook-...
If you don't want to use that method, you'll have to live with most of the limitations. Well, #2 can be addressed by configuring the corresponding behavior via PowerShell, read here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/user-and-shared-mailboxes/sent-mail-is-not-sa...

[#3]

Kinda sad that auto-configuration is such limited but okay.
I'll make a doc to show my users how to do 2nd method themselves.

[#4]

Hi @servierem,

it might be you'll find these add-ins useful:

UniSent and RightFrom. 

[#5]

Hello @Vasil Michev 

I absolutely agree with you. Using a shared mailbox without automapping, added as an additional account to Outlook, instead of an additional mailbox, brings the best usability for end users (full feature set as you mentioned).

Since the approach you suggested is relatively unknown (but very good!), I see many companies taking yet another approach. They use a standard user mailbox and share the password with all users who need access to this “shared” user mailbox. However, this creates many other disadvantages. The main problem is that access is controlled by password instead of access rights. This leads to uncontrolled sharing of passwors, additional licenses on EXO, problems with MFA, use of credentials for interactive logon on clients, problems with coordination of password changes, locked users and so on... So even more reasons to use the approach you recommend.

My only concern for this approach is that I don’t know if it is supported by Microsoft. I have not found any reference to this approach being recommended/supported by Microsoft. Hopefully I have simply overlooked something :). However, while searching, I noticed a comment on one of your older posts in relation to this approach:

“This is completely unsupported by MS, and if you go in to hybrid with EXO, and start migrating you will have some major issues with modern authentication during migration.” (https://www.michev.info/Blog/Post/1507/how-to-add-a-shared-mailbox-as-additional-account-in-outlook, comment by Carlos from 7. August 2017) 

Since this comment is already five years old, it may no longer be valid. Anyway, do you know if Microsoft officially supports the recommended approach? If you don’t know for sure, it would be very nice to get a statement by Microsoft itself. Because it is the only good way of accessing a shared mailbox…

[#6]

Looks pretty supported to me :)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-and-use-a-shared-mailbox-in-outlook-d94a8e9e-21f1-42...

[#7]

@Vasil Michev 

Are you referring to the mobile device part? In which a shared mailbox is added as an additional account to Outlook for iOS or Android and uses FullAccess permission of the existing account? Because in the Outlook part there is only a description to add the shared mailbox as an additional mailbox (without full feature set). Or what am I overlooking? 

[#8]

Sorry, wrong one - should have opened the link before posting :)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/add-rules-to-a-shared-mailbox-b0963400-2a51-4c64-afc7-b816...

[#9]

Yes, this looks very supported. Exactly what I was looking for but did not find. Thank you very much.