Shared mailboxes are great. They can be used for a variety of scenarios within your environment.

 

What is that for a feature?

Emails can be sent as the shared mailbox itself or on behalf of it by member(s) of the mailbox, assuming proper permissions have been granted. This feature is designed to retain a copy of an email sent from the shared mailbox in the Sent Items folder of the shared mailbox. The same behavior can be expected for emails sent on behalf of the shared mailbox, when configured to do so.

Note: If the user has used the Outlook 2013 feature to change the folder that sent items are saved to, the messages will be copied to that folder instead of the user’s Sent Items folder. Users can reconfigure this by clicking the “Save Sent Items To” button on the Email Options tab.

 

How to enable

So let’s have a look in the Office 365 Portal and what kind of options we have for shared mailboxes on Exchange online. After we have made a login to our portal, we browse to Groups and expand this menu:

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Now let’s choose the mailbox on which we want to enable the sent item copy feature:

 

This is what we want to enable! There are two toggles here, for send as the mailbox, and sent on behalf of the mailbox. Enabling these options and clicking Save will now show the Sent items row as “Copied to mailbox” instead of “Not copied to mailbox” on the information panel.

 

 

Verify with PowerShell

After we have activated the options for the shared mailbox we wanted, we can connect to the exchange online remote PowerShell and check the settings:

If we run the following command:

Get-Mailbox -Identity [email protected] | FL

It will bring up these two attributes, which we just changed earlier in this article:

MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled : True

MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled : True

Of course, we are also able to set these attributes for shared mailboxes by PowerShell. The command for this is:

Set-Mailbox -Identity [email protected] -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $true -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $true

However, how about multiple shared mailboxes. We could write a script with a few variables, or we just keep it simple… I prefer the 2nd option… To enable this feature for all of our shared mailboxes, we need to run the following command:

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails shared | Where-Object{$_.messagecopyforsentasenabled -eq ""} | Set-Mailbox -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $true -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $true

Now all magic is done! We´ve just enabled the (really cool) feature for all of our shared mailboxes. I hope this article was a little inspiration, or at least a little help for you…

🙂

 

 

 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash