Shared mailboxes are used when multiple people need access to the same mailbox, such as company information or a support email address, reception, or another function that can be shared by multiple people. You can also use the shared mailbox as a calendar for shared teams.
In addition, email and documents are traditionally stored in two unique and separate data repositories. Most organizations work with both media. The challenge is that both email and documents are accessible through different clients. This usually results in reduced user productivity and a diminished user experience.
And…
- However, a shared mailbox is not designed for direct login. The user account for the shared mailbox itself must remain disabled.
- When too many designated users access a shared mailbox simultaneously (no more than 25 is recommended), they may intermittently fail to connect to this mailbox or experience inconsistencies, such as messages being duplicated in the outbox.
- Your shared mailbox can store up to 50 GB of data without assigning a license to it. After that, you must assign a license to the mailbox to store more data. This is then also limited to 100 GB. When a shared mailbox reaches its storage limit, you can receive email for a while, but you cannot send new email. After that, it stops receiving email. Senders to the mailbox will receive a non-delivery receipt.
- User permissions: You must grant users permissions (membership) to use the shared mailbox. Only people within your organization can use a shared mailbox. You cannot give people outside your company (such as people with a Gmail account) access to your shared mailbox.
- You cannot encrypt email sent from a shared mailbox. This is because a shared mailbox does not have its own security context (username/password), so no key can be assigned to it.
Site mailboxes in Microsoft 365
A better alternative is to switch to Microsoft 365 Groups with Site Mailboxes in SharePoint. Site mailboxes are shared mailboxes that allow you to coordinate and store email messages and documents in one place on a SharePoint site to store all common files. The site mailbox is a solution to this problem. Site mailboxes improve collaboration and user productivity by providing access to both Microsoft SharePoint documents and Exchange email with the same client interface. A site mailbox functionally consists of SharePoint site membership (owners and members), shared storage via an Exchange mailbox for email messages and a SharePoint site for documents, and a management interface that meets provisioning and lifecycle needs.
When a project member submits email or documents using the team mailbox, each project member then has access to the content. Site mailboxes give users easy access to the email and documents for the projects they are working on. In addition, the same set of content is directly accessible from the SharePoint site itself. With site mailboxes, the content is stored where it belongs. Exchange stores the email and provides users with the same message view for email conversations that they use every day for their own mailboxes. Meanwhile, SharePoint stores the documents, bringing co-creation and document versioning to the table. Exchange synchronizes sufficient metadata from SharePoint to create the document view in Outlook (for example, document title, date last modified, last modified author, size).
Docubird makes it easy
With Docubird, you can easily add all metadata to these documents, either manually or fully automated in a background process. Docubird can automatically add all relevant email data as metadata to the email, making it very easy to search for this data.