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Background: To get round issues of branding our users have to send emails from specific domains that we own for specific products we sell. To make it more complicated all these email addresses come into the same mailbox. Lets call it Products. obviously the domains in this example aren't the real ones but lets say we own all the domain names I'm using.

So we have a products mailbox with a default address of products@marvel.example We also need to send and receive as products@dc.example And also products@darkhorse.example

To do this we have created contacts for products@darkhorse.example and products@dc.example and given the users send-as permissions for each contact.

We also have transport rules set up so any mail coming to either of the contacts is routed to the products@marvel.example account.

So from the user's perspective they only have to deal with 1 mailbox, and when they want to send as @dc or @darkhorse all they need to do is change it in the From drop down menu. This gets past the issue of only being able to send from your default address. It's not pretty or elegant but it works. It was all set up long before I joined, I just manage it now.

Problem: By default, the sent items go into the User's sent items folder. I can't redirect them to the contact sent items obviously because that doesn't exist. The user says it should be going to the products@marvel sent items whether they send as the mailbox or either of the contacts. I was convinced that wasn't possible, but one of the users showed me it working on their system. They send from the contact, and it goes into the shared mailbox sent items.

How is it working? They don't seem to have any rules set up. I can't see any transport rules that could possibly do it. Can anyone help me understand how it's working so I can replicate it on other people's systems?

To clarify: How can the user send as the products@dc.example contact, and have the email go into the sent items of the products@marvel.example shared mailbox?

SysAdminUK
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2 Answers2

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The use of Contacts for this function is wrong. It isn't something I would be doing. The behaviour you are seeing is correct - Exchange/Outlook doesn't know where to route the email. I have no idea how the emails are getting in to the Shared Mailbox without some kind of rule (it could be a hidden rule). As you are using a contact, there is no connection for Exchange between the Shared Mailbox and the email address.

You also must have done something to allow the From field to be used in the way that it is. Granting Send As on its own doesn't do that. The drop down only occurs when the mailboxes are added to Outlook as an additional account. If you are using the nicknames selection, then that doesn't always work correctly and certainly isn't something I would depend on.

The way it SHOULD have been done is via a Shared Mailbox. Give the users Send As and Full Mailbox permissions to the mailbox. Then add the mailbox as an additional ACCOUNT. The users can then select the address from the From field and the emails go in to the correct Sent Items automatically. You can also have different rules, Out of Office and signatures per account. Inbound email will go in to the correct mailbox of course, and users will get notifications. Replies to those new emails will automatically have the From field populated with the correct address.

Sembee
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  • I know it's not the intended purpose of them, but I also know it's working and has worked without any problems for many years. The from field is fine, A Powershell command is run to give the user send as permission as a contact and then it just works. We can't use a shared mailbox as it all needs to go to a single mailbox sent items. And somehow it's working, I just can't see how. How do I check for hidden rules, where would there be? What about some kind of rule that copies the message to the shared box, and the a rule on the shared box moves it to the sent items folder? – SysAdminUK Aug 04 '17 at 07:52
  • By hidden rule I mean most likely a corrupt rule - something odd done years ago that cannot be seen by Outlook or OWA. Sending the email to the other mailbox and then moving it to Sent Items via another rule might be happening, again a fudge. However the fact that it has been "working" like that for years doesn't mean that it was working correctly, it will continue to work or is the correct way to do it. – Sembee Aug 04 '17 at 17:32
  • Unfortunately there is no 'proper' solution that allows us to send from different addresses from the same shared mailbox so all we have are workarounds. This workaround works, and it has worked correctly and there's no reason it would ever stop working. it's a simple send-as, nothing complicated: Get-Contact -Identity "Products_dc" | Add-ADPermission -user "domain\user"-ExtendedRights "Send As" . I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The sent mail goes into your sent items and that's fine, working as intended. My question is how the mail is ending up in the shared sent items. – SysAdminUK Aug 07 '17 at 07:35
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I can't explain how it's working currently, but I can replicate it with a workaround on the workaround which does the job well enough.

I have a transport rule, anything sent from the contact addresses is marked in the header with a FromContact field and copied to the inbox of the shared mailbox. The shared mailbox then has a rule that says anything arriving in the inbox with a FromContact field in the header is moved to the Sent items.

It's ugly but it's been tested and it works so I'll consider this solved.

SysAdminUK
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