The Secrets of SharePoint Site Mailbox
A site mailbox serves as a central filing cabinet, providing a place to file project emails and documents that can be only accessed and edited by site members.
It can be used from a SharePoint team site to store and organize team email. It can also be used from Outlook 2013 that ships in Office 365 ProPlus or Office Professional Plus for team email, and as a way to quickly store attachments and retrieve documents from the team site.
User will not see a site mailbox in their Outlook client unless they are an owner or member of that site mailbox.
Secret 1: Remove Site Mailbox from outlook client
Anyone in the default owners group or the default members group for the site (anyone with Contribute permissions) can use the site mailbox from SharePoint. People can be listed in the owners or members group as individuals or as part of a security group.
There are two ways to hide the site mailbox appearing in user’s outlook
A. Managing the site mailboxes from Outlook Manually
Users can simply right click on the personal mailbox. By selecting ‘Manage All Site Mailboxes’, users will be directed to a list of all site mailboxes they have access to. They can easily pin and unpin site mailboxes to the outlook view from there.
B. But if you don’t want users to see the site mailbox from the outlook at all. Here is the tip, do not add users to the default members or owners group of the SharePoint site. Create a separate SharePoint group with Edit permission and add users to the new group so that they can still access the site mailbox through the web but the mailbox will not appear on their outlook.
Secret 2: Rename an existing site mailbox
Here is another tip, what happened if users are not happy with site mailbox name appears on the Global address list? There is lots of efforts to delete the site mailbox and reassign the permission.
But here is the work around, you need to follow the steps below:
- In Office 365 admin center > Active users, find the site mailbox.
- Choose the site mailbox and edit its display name.
- Then go to the site with the mailbox, go to Site Settings -> Title, descitption and logo
- Update the Title with the new site mailbox name too
NB: if you did not update the site name, Exchange will reverse back the site mailbox name back to the site name. Smart enough, isn’t it 🙂