 A shared mailbox is a single shared email address, such as support@yourcompany.com that is used by multiple members of a team or company to send and receive emails from a central inbox your employees can access and respond to. When employees respond to a shared email account, it shows as being sent from the shared email address, not their business email address.  Shared mailboxes do not use a user account or M365 license, so many small businesses use a shared email to help conserve email space. Also, you get a shared calendar to keep everyone on the same page.
What will I learn?
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How to create a shared mailbox
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How to add the shared inbox and calendar in Outlook
What do I need?
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10 minutes
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Access to the Microsoft 365 admin center
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Outlook for Windows
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Sign into admin.microsoft.com. Only the admin for the business or an employee who has been given admin permissions will be able to sign in.
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Select Teams & groups > Shared mailboxes.
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Select Add a shared mailbox.Â
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Type the name of the shared mailbox and what you want the email address to be. If you have multiple domains, you can choose the one you want to use. Then select Save changes.
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After the shared mailbox is created, select Add members to your shared mailbox to give employees access to the mailbox.
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Select Add members and select the employees you want to add from the list. You can also search for a member if you want. Then select Add.
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Exit out of the Shared mailbox members pane and then select the name of the mailbox that was created. From here you can do things like:
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Edit the mailbox information
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Add more members
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Create an automatic reply from the mailbox
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Manage mailbox permissions for each of the members
Tip: Shared mailboxes usually don’t require a license and some small businesses use shared mailboxes to save email space. If your shared mailbox has a license associated with it, you can return the license so that you aren’t paying for a license you don’t need. See Remove license from shared mailbox to learn more.
After you’ve created the shared mailbox, it’s very simple for anyone you added as a member of the shared mailbox to add the inbox and calendar to Outlook.Â
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Go to Outlook. If it’s already open, close the app and wait a few moments. Then, open the app. As the app starts, the shared inbox will load under your primary account.
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Select the shared inbox to see any emails that have been delivered to that mailbox. You can respond to emails directly from that email address, so anyone from your business can respond without it showing who is actually responding.
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Select Calendar and then select the shared calendar under My Calendars.
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When you enter appointments, everyone who is a member of the shared mailbox will be able to see them.
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Any member of the shared mailbox can create, view, and manage appointments on the calendar, just like they would their personal appointments. Everyone who is a member of shared mailbox can see their changes to the shared calendar.
Tip: You can look at your calendar and the shared calendar side by side, or if they’re both selected choose View in overlay mode to see the events all together.Â
