Under Microsoft's Office 365 plans, clients can have "shared mailboxes" added to their plans. Here is a short guide to what a shared mailbox is and what it can do for you.
A shared mailbox makes it easy for a group of people to monitor and send email from a public email alias like [email protected]. When a person in the group replies to a message sent to the shared mailbox, the email appears to be from the shared address, not from the individual user.
- Shared mailboxes do not attract any licensing fees (unlike individual user mailboxes) except when they are over their storage quota of 50GB.
- Shared mailboxes make it easy for a specific group of people to monitor and send email from a common account, like public email addresses, such as [email protected] or [email protected]. When a person in the group replies to a message sent to the shared mailbox, the email appears to be from the shared mailbox, not from the individual user.
- Shared mailboxes are a great way to handle customer email queries because several people in an organization can share the responsibility of monitoring the mailbox and responding to queries. The customer queries get quicker answers, and related emails are all stored in one mailbox.
- Shared mailboxes are also ideal for storing the mailbox contents of terminated employees.
Shared mailboxes include a shared calendar! A lot of small businesses like to use the shared calendar as a place for everyone to enter their appointments. For example, if you have 3 people who do customer visits, all can use the shared calendar to enter the appointments. This is an easy way to keep everyone informed where people are.
Add the shared mailbox to Outlook
If you have automapping enabled in your business (by default, most people do), the shared mailbox will appear in your user's Outlook app automatically after they close and restart Outlook.
Use a shared mailbox on a mobile device (phone or tablet)
To access a shared mailbox on a mobile device, open your browser, sign in to Office 365, and then go Outlook on the web. For instructions, see Add a shared mailbox in Outlook on the web. From Outlook on the web, you'll be able to access the shared mailbox.
Use the shared calendar
When you created the shared mailbox, you automatically created a shared calendar. We like the shared mailbox calendar rather than a SharePoint calendar for keeping track of appointments and where people are. A shared calendar is integrated with Outlook and it's much easier to use than a SharePoint calendar.
In the Outlook app, go to the calendar view, and choose the shared mailbox.
Choose the calendar view
When you enter appointments, everyone who is a member of the shared mailbox will be able to see them.
Any member of the shared mailbox can create, view, and manage appointments on the calendar, just as they would their personal appointments. Everyone who is a member of a shared mailbox can see their changes to the shared calendar.
Prevent members from deleting messages in a shared mailbox
Unfortunately, you can't prevent people from deleting messages in a shared mailbox. For example, let's say you have 5 people using a shared mailbox. One of them deletes an email after reading it. Now the email has been deleted for everyone, even if they hadn't read the message. The only way around this is to create an Office 365 Group instead of a shared mailbox.