Need advice to set up a correct email scheme

Question

We have 3 company members with their respective personal mailboxes

• person1@
• person2@
• person3@

We also have 3 specific purpose mailboxes

• info@
• sales@
• accounting@

Now we have

• random/temp employees (with no personal mailboxes) that need to utilize some or all of these 3 specific mailboxes from different Windows devices
• company members who also need to oversee some or all of these 3 specific mailboxes

What's the correct way of setting things up?

The straightforward solution is to assign everyone a 365 Business Basic/Standard license and then have each mailbox added to the corresponding Windows device in Outlook application.

Another solution would be to create info@, sales@ and accounting@ as Shared Mailboxes. That way they could be assigned under the corresponding company members but how will they be utilized from the corresponding employees?

To summarize, what's the benefit and why it is suggested to configure info@, sales@ etc as Shared Mailboxes when they need to also operate independently?

Answer 1

I would set them up as shared mailboxes. Why?

1. No additional licenses required
2. You can give full and send as access to the person1, 2 and 3 and they can manage as needed

Unless you need to actually logon to the info, sales and accounting mailboxes, there is typically no need to create regular user mailboxes and you can save money on the licenses

More detail here: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/email/about-shared-mailboxes?view=o365-worldwide]

Answer 2

What about the personnel (5 people from 5 different windows devices in the same building) who need to access info@, sales@ and accounting@?

Answer 3

 

Hi @CostasD ,

In my opinion, there is not much difference between the two.

For shared mailboxes, you need to grant the user mailboxes full access permission of the shared mailbox to view its contents. Therefore, these user mailboxes need to be assigned licenses.

Creating a shared mailbox itself doesn't require any license.

Because you want company members to be able to see who is operating these three private mailboxes, please consider the following scenarios:

1.    Convert a special-purpose mailbox to a shared mailbox.

2.    Create user mailboxes and assign licenses for temporary employees.

3.    Grant Full Access/Send As permissions to the shared mailbox to the desired user mailbox.

You can refer to this link to see what happens in the shared mailbox:

Manage mailbox auditing - Microsoft Purview (compliance) | Microsoft Learn

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