Exchange Server-Shared Mailboxes

A shared mailbox is one of the recipient type in exchange that doesn’t have its own user name and password. Due to this, users can’t log into it them directly.To access a shared mailbox, users must first be granted Send As or Full Access permissions to the mailbox. Once that’s done, users sign into their own mailboxes and then access the shared mailbox by adding it to their Outlook profile.

Shared mailboxes makes it easy for a group of people in your company to monitor and send email from a common account, such as info@example.com or support@example.com.

When a person in the group replies to a message sent to the shared mailbox, the email looks like it was sent by the shared mailbox, not from the individual user.

Beginning in Exchange 2007, shared mailboxes became their own recipient type:

RecipientType: UserMailbox
RecipientTypeDetails: SharedMailbox

In previous versions of Exchange server, creating a shared mailbox was a multi-step process from Exchange Management Shell.

In Exchange 2013, we can use the Exchange admin center (EAC) to create a shared mailbox in one step.

If your organization uses a hybrid Exchange environment, you should use the on-premises Exchange admin centre (EAC) to create and manage shared mailboxes.

Create a shared mailbox using Exchange Admin centre

1. Go to Recipients > Shared > Add .
2. Fill-in the required fields: Display name, Email address
3. To grant Full Access or Send As permissions, click Add , and then select the users you want to grant permissions to. You can use the CTRL key to select multiple users.

Create Shared Mailbox using shell:

New-Mailbox -Shared -Name “HelpDesk Department” -DisplayName “HelpDesk” -Alias Helpdesk | Set-Mailbox -GrantSendOnBehalfTo L1-Support | Add-MailboxPermission -User L1-Support -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

Which permissions should we use?

We can use the below permissions with a shared mailbox.

• Full Access
• Send As
• Send on Behalf

• Regular
• Room
• Equipment
• Shared