Multiple accounts in Outlook when they have SendAs rights and mailbox permission to each other

[Michiel van den Broek]

I think I posted this question on Yammer IT Pro Network months ago, but can't find it (and for what I remember did not yet have a answer to my question).

Situation:

Company "Contoso" has two employees, Rob and John. Rob is CEO and has a mailaccount "Rob". John doesn't have his own mailaccount. He works with the central mailbox called "Info". This account is is a user mailbox (with O365 Business Premium License). After a while a new employee enters the stage called Marie. She also works with the "Info" account on her own PC.

Now the situation has changed and CEO Rob decides to give John and Marie their own mailboxes called "John" and "Marie". The reason is he wants to be able to send some emails to them individually and not through the "Info" mailbox. But the main business emails to their customers have to be done with the "Info" account.

To facilitate I created two mailboxes "Marie" and "John" and gave them mailbox access and Send As permision to the "Info" mailbox. So, when I configure "John" in his Outlook Desktop, it will automatically open the mailbox "Info". This is the same as is configured for CEO Rob, who works from his "Rob" account, but just wants to view "Info" (and incidently send mail from it).

Nowww... as I said, John and Marie want to mainly work from the "Info" account, but all the configuration (signatures, rules, etc.) is tied to their personal account and I cannot set the "Info" mailbox as the default account to work from.

To solve this I added "Info" as a seperated account in their Outlook. This seems to give no problems when I set it up. But it only works the first time. After a restart of Outlook it doesn't work anymore and mail isn't send.

(the configuration seems to work when I delete the Send As permissions and mailbox access)

Did I make a mistake in setup?

[#2]

Adding a shared mailbox as an account to a profile doesn't work well - usually manifested in things like rules & alerts not opening and other goofy behavior.

Try removing auotmapping - from the account so its only in the profile as the account.

Add-MailboxPermission "shared-mailbox" -User "alias" -AccessRights FullAccess –AutoMapping $False

If this continues to be a problem, licensing will work ($4/mo for the E1 plan). If they mostly reply as info, replies should go out as info - only need messages would need the From address changed. This won't help with the signture, although a macro can change the signature.

[#3]

Hi Diane, thank you very much! This seems very logical!

The thing that kept me bugging about this situation was that at my local Gym (where I don't do IT management) the reception has opened the mailbox of every Fitness instructor and physiotherapist in her Outlook (like 15 mailboxes or more). And there are no problems. So, why do my customers, with only one or two extra mailboxes have this strange problem.

I'm gonna try this solution with automapping turned off and report back to you.

[#4]

Are you sure that "Info" is really a user mailbox and not a shared mailbox?

A shared mailbox with a license assigned is still a shared mailbox, not an user mailbox, and Outlook is skipping a store while collecting messages to send when this is a shared mailbox store.

[#5]

In this specific scenario INFO is a user (and actually called "Kantoor", which is "Office" in Dutch). It is one of the two users who has a full Office 365 Business Premium license assigned. I'm in the process of convincing my customer that only employees should have a Business Premium license and that the INFO mailbox should be a shared mailbox. But for now it is not. :)