How To: Share Mailbox on Exchange 2003

This is just a quick post on process of sharing a mailbox within exchange. Its mainly for me just in case I forget later but if it helps just one person it will be worth the posting.

This is done on Small Business Server 2003 with Microsoft Exchange 2003, although it may be applied to Exchange 2007 but I’m not sure I haven’t yet touched it.

You may want to share a mailbox for a number of reasons but the main reason for me is to allow multiple people to use a mailbox for a certain role. For example you may have an e-mail address along the lines of support@example.com. You may have multiple people replying to support e-mails. By sharing a mailbox users can mark e-mails read, flag or even delete e-mails.

Here is how its done!

Stage 1: Allow users access
1: Create a user account for the e-mail address. I am going to use the example support.
2: Set up the accounts e-mail (pop3 mailbox etc)
3: Log on to the account (Support)
4: Open Outlook, Click; Tools > Options > Delegates > Add
5: Add/Find users you would like to grant permissions to
6: Add the user by clicking “Add–>>;”  Tip: you may add multiple users
7: Click OK
8: Clicking the Inbox drop-down menu; select editor (See Fig1)
9: Click OK x2, and return to Outlook

Stage 2: Apply permissions to the inbox.
10: Right Click “Mailbox – “useraccount displayname”" and select Properties
11: Add the users from before
12: Grant each user “Publishing Editor” permissions
13: Click OK
14: Log off

Stage 3: Add the mailbox
15: Log on to the user account you granted access to (Eg user1)
16: Open Outlook
17: Click Tools > E-mail Accounts
18: Click Next > Change
19: Click More Settings > Advanced
20: Click Add
21: Enter the name of the mailbox (Eg Support)
22: Click Ok
23: A message box will appear, Click Ok
24: Click Next > Finish
25: Upon returning to the main Outlook screen the mailbox should appear down the left hand side
26: If it doesn’t restart Outlook
27: Repeat stage 3 for each user

Hope this helps?