Shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 Exchange Online are free-to-use mailboxes and are accessed through users with licensed user accounts. You can be sent and receive mail to Shared Mailboxes as well as use email management features such as rules and forwarding.
In this post, I am going to show you how you can use the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to create a Shared mailbox and assign permission to users for access to that Shared mailbox.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out my full Microsoft 365 Admins Guidebook online for free, directly through my website.
Create a Shared mailbox in Microsoft 365
- Start by logging into admin.microsoft.com and change your view to Dashboard View. If you are not sure how to change your view to Dashboard view, I show you how to do this in my new user creation guide here.
- From the menu, expand Teams & groups and select Shared mailboxes
- Click on Add a shared mailbox
- A new window will pop open from the right. Enter a name for your shared mailbox (the name will be the Display Name for your mailbox and it is what internal will users see in their Outlook and what External users will see as the contact when receiving mail from this mailbox. Also enter the email address you whish the shared mailbox to have with your custom domain
- Click Save and close the pop-out Window
- You should still be on the Shared mailboxes page at this point and you should be able to see your newly created Shared mailbox in the list.
- Now we are going to give permission for a user to read and manage this Shared mailbox. Start by clicking on the name of the Shared mailbox, this is highlighted above in my case ‘IT Career Receipts‘. A new window will pop open to the right.
- Towards the bottom right, you will see the section headed Manage mailbox permissions. Click on Read and manage permissions.
- Click Add permissions. Take note of the information on the screen. It states we are giving the user permission read emails within this mailbox and managed the content within it (add, delete, edit..). It also states that when making permission changes, it can take up to 60 minutes to take effect, so you can set your users expectations at this point.
- Select the user you wish to add from the list and click Add. If successful, you will see a green notice on the same screen as per the below.
- You can now apply the same process if you wish to give someone permission to Send As this Shared Mailbox or Send on Behalf of this Shared Mailbox.
