Can a shared mailbox be used for SMTP relay?
Mailboxes, Aliases, Shared Mailboxes, and GroupsIf your business is in the adoption phase of Office 365 Email, you will want to think about all of the email addresses in your company and how they will be brought in to Office 365. There is a tendency to want to create a mailbox for every email address in your business or, an email address for every employee and aliases if an employee is responsible for an email address other than his or her own. While these options will likely work, and may be the best fit for some businesses, they could also lead to inefficiencies, difficulty making changes later and worst, be an unnecessary expense. Show Here’s what you need to know: A mailbox is usually associated with a single user and requires a license. A mailbox is required for a user to log on to and use Office 365 email.
An Office 365 Email alias is simply another email address attached to your mailbox. You can have multiple email addresses that all come into your inbox. One of those email addresses is your “primary” email address and any email you send will appear to come from your primary email address, even if you reply to an email sent to another of your email addresses.
A shared mailbox is just that, a mailbox that can be shared with one or more users. Shared mailboxes do not require a license and have all of the features of a normal mailbox; they have an inbox, a calendar, a contact list etc.
* Office 365 Groups have much the same functionality as shared mailboxes. Groups however can have associated SharePoint Team Sites, OneDrive documents, and OneNote notebooks. If collaborating around a mailbox is important to your business, a group may be a better fit than a shared mailbox.
Office 365 Groups vs. Shared Mailboxes Update (November 2022): Read Tony Redmond’s take on this topic five years on after Microsoft has given Outlook Groups a lot more functionality. I was recently asked for my thoughts on using Office 365 Groups instead of shared mailboxes. Groups in Office 365 have many of the features that Exchange Online shared mailboxes do.
Office 365 Groups have additional features that shared mailboxes do not.
However, shared mailboxes have some capabilities that may make them more suitable to teams than Groups.
There is some demand for Group mailboxes to have sub-folders, as shown in the comments on this Uservoice suggestion. It’s quite common for teams that use a shared mailbox as an inbound communication channel to user sub-folder to sort or file away items that have been actioned. Although I prefer to recommend a proper ticketing/job management system instead, I understand that simpler scenarios don’t warrant setting up a whole separate system and that a shared mailbox with some sub-folders is quite sufficient. The sub-folders capability is also a problem for anyone considering migrating public folders to Groups. If the public folders have a complex folder hierarchy that needs to be preserved, then you will basically lose that hierarchy due to the lack of sub-folders in Groups. As it stands right now, the decision to go with Groups or shared mailboxes is a case of “it depends”. Work out which limitations are a showstopper for you, and which capabilities you need the most, and then make your decision based on that. Given the interest that Microsoft has in Groups adoption, perhaps we’ll see the sub-folders capabilities show up in the future. Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash About the AuthorPaul is a former Microsoft MVP for Office Apps and Services. He works as a consultant, writer, and trainer specializing in Office 365 and Exchange Server. Paul no longer writes for Practical365.com. Can you use a shared mailbox for SMTP server?Custom SMTP connections are typically configured using a user's credential for on-prem Exchange shared mailboxes. Once configured successfully, emails sent from that shared mailbox will be delivered through your Exchange servers, but not stored or visible in the sent folder.
Can Office 365 Shared mailbox use SMTP?Save this answer. Show activity on this post. Office 365 Shared Mailboxes (user without Exhcange licence) do not have SMTP access to Exchange online, which is a bit different from behaviour you might expect when coming from on premise Exchange.
Can a shared mailbox be used to send emails?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.
Does Office 365 allow SMTP relay?SMTP relay lets Microsoft 365 or Office 365 relay emails on your behalf by using a connector that's configured with your public IP address or a TLS certificate.
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