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 SharePoint site members.

It can be used from a SharePoint team site to store and organise team email or via Outlook 2013 for team email, and as a way to quickly store attachments and retrieve documents from the team site.

Users will not see a Site Mailbox in their Outlook client unless they are an owner or member of that Site in SharePoint.

Secret 1: Remove Site Mailbox from Outlook client

Outlook 2013 has been enhanced to support Site Mailboxes, with a really nice integration point being the automated rollout of Site Mailboxes directly to user’s Outlook profile based on the user’s permission to the SharePoint site.

Anyone in the default owners or members groups for the site (anyone with Contribute permissions) can use the Site Mailbox. People can be listed in the owners or members group as individuals or as part of a security group. Once the Site Mailbox is provisioned, the Site Mailbox will automatically be added to Outlook, with the reverse true if the user’s permission is removed.

There are two ways to manage visibility of the Site Mailbox in Outlook:

A. Managing from Outlook manually

Users can simply right click on their personal mailbox and by selecting ‘Manage All Site Mailboxes’, users will be directed to a list of all Site Mailboxes they have access to and they can easily pin and unpin them from there.

Manage all Site Mailboxes in Outlook

B. Group Membership in SharePoint

If you don’t want users to see the Site Mailbox in Outlook at all here is the tip – do not add users to the default members or owners group in SharePoint. Instead, 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 be available in Outlook.

Secret 2: Rename an existing Site Mailbox

Here is another tip – what happened if users are not happy with the Site Mailbox name that shows in the Global Address List (GAL)? There is lots of efforts to delete the Site Mailbox and reassign the permission if all we want to do is rename it.

I have great news – here is the work around:

  1. In the Office 365 Admin Center > Active users, find the Site Mailbox
  2. Select the Site Mailbox and edit its display name
  3. Then go to the Site with the mailbox, go to Site Settings > Title, description and logo
  4. Update the Title with the new Site Mailbox name too.

Note: if you did not update the Site name (the last step), Exchange will revert the name of the Site Mailbox name back to the Site name – Smart enough, isn’t it :).

So there we have a couple of useful tips – hopefully they’ve helped you out!

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Join the conversation! 5 Comments

  1. default email box has subdomain stuffed into it. how would you suggest changing it [email protected]

    • Hello Paragyte,

      You can change the email adresses via powershell command. In the command below, just change “mailbox_user_name” to the username that is created for your teamsite mailbox. This should look something like “SMO-12547DNQS”

      To connect open Powershell (make sure to have the last version and all cmdlets necessary for the operation)

      Step 1: Connect to exchange online
      $UserCredential = Get-Credential
      $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential UserCredential -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection
      Import-PSSession $Session

      Step 2: check all actual properties
      get-mailbox -identity [email protected] | fl
      I suggest you copy the emailaddresses line here to notepad and modify to something like below

      Step 3: edit emailaddresses (SMTP in caps will set the default email address)
      Set-Mailbox “mailbox_user_name” -EmailAddresses SMTP:[email protected],smtp:[email protected],smtp:[email protected],smtp:[email protected]

      Worked for us

  2. What??? It’s that simple to change the name? I spent 2 hours last night trying to use cmdlets through Azure AD Module for Windows Powershell only to discover, obviously on the last step, that it didn’t take.

    I submit the powershell is not that powerful afterall.

    Thanks for the post!!!

  3. Such a great article to read. It was very clear and to the point. Keep up the good work and I am eagerly waiting for your next release.

  4. wow Nice its very useful for team members to maintaining all emails in share point,thanks for your post

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