Shared mailboxes

A shared mailbox is an address that belongs to no one person, such as support@, info@ or legal@. Nobody signs in to it. The people you assign open it beside their own mail, at an access level you choose, and what they send goes out from the shared address.

Shared mailbox or group?

Both let several people work in one mailbox. They answer different needs:

	Group	Shared mailbox
Example	maths-dept@, a team or a class	support@, a role
Who gets in	Everyone in the group, because they're in it	The people you assign, one by one
What else they get	The group's role and permissions	Nothing else
Access levels	All members alike	Read only, read and organize, or full, per person
Sending as it	Every member	Only people you allow

Neither kind can be shared on by the people in it: who has it is decided here, by an administrator.

Add a shared mailbox

Shared mailboxes are under Management › Directory › Shared mailboxes.

1. If the address doesn't have an account yet, make one under Accounts, as you would for a person.
2. Press Add a shared mailbox… and choose that account.
3. Add the people, up to 100, and for each choose:
   • Read only: sees everything, changes nothing, and reading doesn't even mark mail read.
   • Read and organize: also flags, files and moves mail and makes folders, but never deletes.
   • Full: everything the mailbox's owner could do.
   • May send as this account: needs Read and organize or Full.
4. Press Make it shared.

From then on nobody can sign in to the account, by any means, and its open sessions end. No reason is asked for, unlike locking an account.

To change who has it, press People…. A tenant's administrator manages their own tenant's shared mailboxes, with people from that tenant.

What the people see

In inbuxa Webmail, the mailbox is listed under Mail to show in the account menu. Opening it shows its mail in place of their own, with a bar naming it, their access level and whether they can send as it. Their calendar, contacts and files stay their own.

A desktop mail app sees it under Shared Folders.

Replies come back to the mailbox

A message sent from a shared mailbox must say it is from the mailbox:

• its From has to be one of the mailbox's own addresses;
• so does its Reply-To, if it has one.

A message that names a person's own address in either is refused. That way the customer's answer comes back to support@, where everyone can see it, rather than to whoever happened to reply. The copy is kept in the shared mailbox's Sent.

Automatic replies

A shared mailbox's own automatic reply and filters keep working. That is the difference from a locked account, which answers no one. Set the reply up before making the account shared, while it can still be signed in to.

What is recorded

The audit log records:

• making a mailbox shared, changing its people, and stopping sharing it;
• every message sent as it, with the person who sent it.

Reading, flagging and moving mail in a shared mailbox isn't recorded, so a busy help desk doesn't bury the log.

Who may share

Some organizations, such as schools, don't want people's own mailboxes shared at all. Two switches decide it:

• People may share their mail folders.
• People may add other accounts to the webmail.

The server's switches are at the top of Settings › Sharing, and apply to everyone. Each organization has the same two on its own page under Management › Directory › Tenants, where its administrator can turn them off for that organization only. An organization can be stricter than the server, never looser: a switch the server has off shows off there too.

With mail sharing off:

• nobody can share a mail folder with someone else, from any app;
• what was already shared stops working, but isn't deleted: turn sharing back on and it works again;
• anyone can still stop sharing something;
• groups and shared mailboxes keep working, since an administrator set those up.

Every change to these switches is in the audit log.

Stop sharing

Press Stop sharing…. The people lose the mailbox, and it becomes an ordinary account again: anyone who knows its password can sign in, so set a new password on its page if needed. Its mail stays where it is.