Exchange 2016: Create Shared Mailbox

Exchange supports different types of Mailboxes including User, Linked, Resources and Shared.

Generally speaking Shared Mailboxes are used by organisations to give access in read/write to different members of a team to the same mailbox. Typical examples include recipients like support@company.com or info@company.com and so on. Creating Shared Mailboxes in Exchange it’s a very simple process and can be done from both the ECP page and specific PowerShell commands. In terms of permissions for Shared Mailboxes these can be defined as:

Full access: Users with this permissions are acting as owners of the Mailbox and have full control on emails and calendars but cannot send emails unless they also have the send as or Send on behalf of permissions granted.

 Send As: gives the ability to users with this permissions granted to “impersonate” the mailbox name and send the email as the logged in shared mailbox (eg. Send/reply email as support@company.com)

Send on Behalf of:gives the ability to send the on behalf of the shared mailbox name  and this will appear to the target recipient (eg. Mail sent from John.Doe on behalf of support@company.com) . The “send on behalf of” option can be set only through a PowerShell command with a specific parameter:

 “Set-Mailbox -Identity “mailbox owner” -GrantSendOnBehalfTo “Delegated User”

So here we are with the creation of our first Shared Mailbox. As per usual let’s visit the Exchange ECP > recipient > shared page and click on the + button

In this example a Shared Mailbox for Support Team

Once created let’s do a double -click to change the properties

From here we can select who has Full Access and Send As

So we connect now with a member of the Support Team and add the Shared Mailbox..

Excellent the search did find the exact mailbox

And as part of the Support Team I can also manage the mails in the inbox

This concludes a quick tour of the basic functions of the Shared Mailboxes. Next article will be about Exchange Server Backups