Exchange Team Blog: Want more control over Sent Items when using shared mailboxes?

Whether a mailbox is used by multiple users as a collaborative tool or a communication gateway to customers, retaining a record of emails sent from a shared mailbox remains an important business requirement. In Exchange 2010, there was a way to configure this behavior, but we did not have this feature starting with Exchange 2013.

Our customers have told us that a shared mailbox should keep a copy of emails sent from the mailbox by all members of the mailbox in its own Sent Items folder. We have taken that feedback and decided to make some changes to how sent mails are handled for shared mailboxes.

We are excited to announce that once this feature is enabled for you (see below), by default all shared mailboxes will retain a copy of emails sent from the mailbox. You will no longer have to figure out which mailbox member sent an email as the shared mailbox or on behalf of it.

How does it work?

Emails can be sent as the shared mailbox itself or on behalf of it by member(s) of the mailbox, assuming proper permissions have been granted. This feature is designed to retain a copy of an email sent from the shared mailbox in the Sent Items folder of the shared mailbox. The same behavior can be expected for emails sent on behalf of the shared mailbox, when configured to do so.

A copy of the sent mail will also reside in the Sent Items folder of the member’s personal mailbox.

Note: If the user has used the Outlook 2013 feature to change the folder that Sent Items are saved to, the messages will be copied to that folder instead of the user’s Sent Items folder. Users can reconfigure this by clicking the “Save Sent Items To” button on the Email Options tab.

Administrators have control over this feature for either mails Sent As or Sent on Behalf of a shared mailbox. The table below summarizes where sent mails reside when members of a shared mailbox send mail from the shared mailbox.

User Mailbox	Shared Mailbox	Sent Items
Exchange 2010	Exchange 2010	Controlled through settings in KB2632409
Exchange 2010	Exchange 2013 (any version)	Controlled through settings in KB2632409
Exchange 2013 CU9 (or newer) Office 365	Exchange 2010	The sent mail will be delivered to both the Inbox of the shared mailbox as an email attachment* and to the user mailbox' sent items
Exchange 2013 CU9 (or newer) Office 365	Exchange 2013 CU9 (or newer) Office 365	The sent mail will be delivered to the Sent Items folder of shared mailbox and to the user mailbox' sent items

* In a scenario where the user’s mailbox is on an Exchange 2013 CU9 server and the shared mailbox is on an Exchange 2010 server, the shared mailbox will get an email message that looks like the following:

This behavior will continue until the shared mailbox is moved to an Exchange 2013 CU9 server.

Who can use this feature?

The feature is available to all customers with shared mailboxes in Office 365 (starting now), as well as our on-premises customers (starting with Exchange 2013 CU9).

How do I enable/disable this feature?

Shared mailboxes will have this feature enabled by default. No action is required.

This feature can be disabled by setting feature enable flag to FALSE:

For emails Sent As the shared mailbox: set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $False

For emails Sent On Behalf of the shared mailbox: set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $False

If you then want to enable the feature again, you can do it as follows:

For emails Sent As the shared mailbox: set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $True

For emails Sent On Behalf of the shared mailbox: set-mailbox <mailbox name> -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $True

What else do I need to know?

• The administrator for your organization has to create the shared mailbox and add you to it as an user, before you can use it.


• If you are an Office 365 Small Business administrator, see Create and use shared mailboxes. If you are an administrator for a different version of Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange administrator, see the TechNet article Create a Shared Mailbox.

Paul Lo

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