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SharePoint Online incoming email alternatives

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Incoming email is one of the features that’s not available in SharePoint Online. Customer with on-premises SharePoint deployments have been using incoming email since a long time and hits this feature gap when migrating to SharePoint Online. A quick search online shows that there are a number of third party solutions filling this gap. In this blog I just want to put forth the out of the box options and alternatives to incoming email in SharePoint Online. Here you go:

  • Site Mailbox ( This is no more an option as SPO deprecated Site Mailbox feature as of July 2017 - Thank you for posting this info in the comments - Maruthachalam Krishnamurthy and Pramod Gupta )
    • Site mailbox is available in the ‘Add an app’ page. So, its essentially an app that uses shared exchange mailbox foundation but users can interact with it within the SharePoint UI. Note that you can create only one Site Mailbox per SharePoint site. So, this is a limitation that you have to live with if you decide to go with Site Mailbox. You can create n number of subsites and create n number of site mailboxes if needed. Site mailboxes
    • Site mailbox name is created automatically. The naming convention is like this: SMO-SiteName@tenant.onmicrosoft.com. Replace the SiteName with the Site name in which the site mailbox is created. You can control the prefix though. The default prefix used is SMO. You can use the Set-SiteMailboxProvisioningPolicy Exchange OnlineWindows PowerShell cmdlet with the –AliasPrefix parameter to create a prefix to use with all new site mailboxes.
  • Office 365 Groups
    • O365 groups is created at the tenant level (not at the site collection or site level). So a tenant admin must create the O365 group for you. Similar to Site mailbox this is based on the shared mailbox infrastructure. The way you access these groups are either through Outlook web app, Outlook or even OneDrive site (in the left nav).
    • The email address created can be of your choice unlike Site Mailbox.
    • Every O365 group created also creates a new Site Collection associated with it. These sites are hidden and are not listed (as of July 2017) in the SharePoint admin center. O365 groups uses this site to provide a shared document workspace, shared calendar, shared OneNote file and of course more.
  • Microsoft Teams (Thanks to Tom Nellikkan for posting this in comments)
  • Some other options that I am evaluating if viable are:
  • Azure Logic apps or Microsoft Flow
    • Either Flow or Logic Apps can be used to create a solution where it can monitor a shared exchange mailbox and trigger an action when there is an attachment to email and copy those files to a SPO site document library. You can use one of the existing templates in Flow.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2016
    Is this not the place to recommend 3rd party solutions? I'm wondering what 3rd party solutions are out there for this. I have found some, but I cannot seem to figure out which ones are the most popular. This mail-enabling of document libraries is a big need for myself and many of my clients. I'm hopeful that Flow will eventually provide this capability but I tested connecting a shared mailbox from which to direct emails to SharePoint Online, and the connection to the shared mailbox fails with an error message. Flow currently allows for directing emails from an Office 365 user account into SharePoint Online, but not from a shared mailbox.
    • Anonymous
      September 21, 2016
      Sorry for the late reply. Honestly I have not used any of the 3rd party solutions, so I can't recommend one. I agree that this is a major feature gap and I too hope either Flow or SPO enables this feature sooner or later.
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2017
    Thanks for sharing this info. Site Mailbox feature is no longer available and hence we may have to use Shared Mailbox option.
    • Anonymous
      July 12, 2017
      Updated article to reflect the deprecation of Site Mailbox
  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2017
    New one use SharePoint Teamhttps://wonderlaura.com/2017/04/11/teams-incoming-email-in-sharepoint-online/
  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2017
    New Site Mailboxes can no longer be created in SharePoint Online. Consider using Office 365 Groups to connect a team site with an email conversation.
    • Anonymous
      July 12, 2017
      Updated article to reflect the deprecation of Site Mailbox