In most businesses the topic of shared email and other mailbox features will come up at some stage.  A business will have certain requirements that the Exchange administrator needs to configure the system to meet.  Depending on what those requirements are the actual configuration used will vary.

One of the most common situations is the sharing of email addresses.  A group of uses need to receive email sent to a certain email address other than their own personal email address.

Sometimes it is appropriate for this to be achieved simply by using a secondary email address on the user’s mailbox.  John Smith can have john.smith@company.com as his primary email address, but also receive email sent to his predecessor’s email address of greg.jones@company.com.

In other cases this does not work so well.  A reception desk staffed by more than one person throughout the week makes it impossible to assign reception@company.com as a secondary email address to each individual person’s mailbox, because an email address can only exist on one mail-enabled object in the organization at any one time.

The solution here could be to use a distribution group, or to use a shared mailbox.  Each has its pros and cons.  A distribution group delivers each mail item sent to the address to each member of the group.  This works fine for newsletters, memos, and other broadcast type information, but not so well for items where only one person needs to take action.

In those cases a shared mailbox is better suited, because it means a single instance of each actionable item and everyone who shares the mailbox can tell when something has already been actioned.  Shared mailboxes are commonly used for Help Desks and sales teams so that a single email address can be publicized and a team of people can access the mailbox to action new items.

Sometimes a shared mailbox is not a generic one that multiple people access, rather it is a person’s primary mailbox that is shared out to their delegates.  The usual scenario for this delegation is an executive and their assistant.  The assistant has delegate access to the mailbox in order to action low priority items, filter out anything irrelevant, and flag anything important for follow up.

The assistant might also be required to send emails on behalf of the executive, such as companywide broadcast emails.  For this the assistant can be granted “Send on Behalf” permissions for the executive’s mailbox.  When the assistant sends messages they are sent as “Assistant’s Name on behalf of Executive’s Name”, making it clear that the communication was sent by a delegate.

For situations such as the Help Desks mentioned early the “Send on Behalf” behaviour might not be suitable.  Instead they can be granted “Send As” permission for the shared mailbox, which means that when sending mails from the shared mailbox there is no automatic indication that it was sent by a delegate.  The easiest way to understand the difference is that “Send As” allows complete impersonation of another mailbox when sending emails.

Of these methods there is no one that is best suited to every scenario.  Instead the Exchange administrator needs to understand the business requirements and apply the correct solution to meet them.