Table of Contents
Introduction:
We live in an era where everyone uses emails for primary communication. The inboxes are full of unread messages. Beyond personal emails, workplace inboxes are often flooded with messages. The solution to clear up this digital communication overload is a shared mailbox. This Outlook feature simplifies the business communication process. A shared mailbox facilitates peers in communicating and responding to business queries from a single interface. It also enhances efficiency by allowing shared calendar access. Stay tuned to this post to learn methods to add a shared mailbox in New Outlook.
Understanding the Benefits of a Shared Mailbox:
Shared mailboxes are quite useful. They allow multiple users to access and manage a common inbox. Some of their benefits are listed below:
- Centralized Communication: If your business entity is dealing with a number of clients, vendors, or customers, a shared mailbox will streamline your business communication process. It will allow the team to solve queries at the earliest.
- Messaging Consistency: The shared mailbox allows all customer interactions in one place. It not only prevents missing emails but also reduces the TAT for resolving customer queries. Thus, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
- Better Team Coordination: It eliminates the culture of email forwarding and promotes a sense of greater accountability as everyone understands their key responsibility areas and tries to resolve their respective issues at the earliest.
- Improves Transparency: It promotes the culture of transparency as every relevant team member is aware of current business issues and how such concerns can be addressed.
- Brand Building: With a quick resolution of business queries, the satisfaction level will increase. It builds the brand’s reputation.
Key Points Related to a Shared Mailbox:
Some highlights of shared mailboxes are listed below:
- It allows multiple users to access and manage a single email account.
- It is perfect for teams that handle common tasks like customer care, project management, etc.
- There are different permission levels, like full access or partial access.
- Shared mailboxes can store up to 50 GB of data without a license. The user has to acquire a license to store more data.
- An IT admin must set up a shared mailbox and assign permissions to users.
- It comes with a shared calendar to schedule meetings, book resources, etc.
What are the Methods to Add a Shared Mailbox in New Outlook?
Method 1: In Case the User is Not an Admin:
1.1 Auto-Mapping by the IT Admin: If the user has already been provided with the shared mailbox access by the IT admin. Restart the Outlook app and the shared mailbox will appear automatically on the left panel.
1.2: Manual Addition by using Outlook Account Settings: If the auto-mapping doesn’t work, then follow the below steps for adding shared mailboxes manually:
- Explore the Outlook application.
- Go to File > Account Settings.
- Choose Account Settings from the dropdown.
- In the Email tab, select your account and click Change.
- Then press More Settings.
- Go to the Advanced tab.
- Then press Add under Open these additional mailboxes.
- Enter the name or email address of the shared mailbox.
- Click OK, then Next, and finally Finish.
- Restart Outlook to load the shared mailbox.
Method 2: When the User has Admin Rights: Follow the below steps to create shared mailboxes in new Outlook:
- Sign in with a user account that has the Exchange admin role.
- Explore the admin center and navigate to the Teams & Groups > Shared mailboxes page.
- On the Shared mailboxes page, select + Add a shared mailbox.
- Enter a name for the shared mailbox. This step requires an email address that can be modified later.
- Select Save ChangesṀ. It may take a few minutes before you can add members.
- Proceed by adding members to the mailbox. Members are individuals who can view and send emails from this mailbox.
- Now it is the time to select the ‘Add members’ button. Choose members for this mailbox and hit Add.
- You have a shared mailbox and it includes a shared calendar.
- Go on to the next step: Block sign-in for the shared mailbox account.
Permissions to be Used?
You can use the following permissions with a shared mailbox:
- Full Access: It is granted to the owners of the folder. Such a user can perform all functions, right from sending emails and creating tasks to view delete, and change email messages.
- Send As: It is granted to the user who can send email messages on behalf of the team.
- Send on Behalf: It lets a user send an email on behalf of the shared mailbox.
But sometimes, users face issues in accessing the shared mailbox. In the majority of cases, the main culprit behind this error is a large OST file. Sometimes this issue is caused by an inaccessible or orphaned Outlook data file (.ost). To regain access to such files, we need a trustworthy OST to PST converter tool. Such tools are based on advanced algorithms. Stellar Converter for OST is one of the such converter tools. This software extracts and restores all mailbox data files (.ost) to a local PST file. It is widely recommended by IT admins owing to its quick conversion speed.
Conclusion:
In the above post, we have discussed how a shared mailbox allows multiple users to access and manage a common inbox. This feature promotes better team coordination, reduces TAT of customer queries, and enhances process efficiency. We have explored key points as well as different methods to add a shared mailbox to Outlook. But, like any other application, Outlook users face different issues like the inability to access or send emails, or create calendars. These errors happen when Outlook fails to sync properly owing to an oversized, orphaned, or inaccessible OST file. To fix this issue, we can use any third-party OST to PST converter tool like Stellar Converter for OST. This converter software efficiently converts mailboxes from inaccessible or orphaned OST files, as well as encrypted IMAP OST files, to PST files.
