Office 365 Shared Mailbox Limitations: What You Need to Know

Knowing about the Office 365 shared mailbox limitations puts you at a major advantage. You will be able to make full use of this free feature that comes with Microsoft 365 business plans. On the contrary, if your workforce remains unaware of what they can and cannot do with the shared mailbox, you are bound to run into the regular troubleshooting problems. The most frustrating part is that these can be avoided altogether with just a tiny bit of insight. So let us start right there.

An Overview of Office 365 Shared Mailbox Limitations

Office 365 Shared Mailboxes provide access to email for group collaboration, but they have restrictions. It has an upper ceiling of 50GB, which is not enough for large companies that operate Terabytes of data daily. Moreover, shared mailboxes depend on a licensed user to send emails; they are unable to send emails on their own.

It does not have a calendar-sharing functionality, so that is the reason, shared mailboxes are not suitable for scheduling and event management. Also, it lacks many advanced options available, like email retention regulations and many more. Due to these drawbacks, shared mailboxes are more appropriate for simple collaborative email needs.

Meaning of Shared Mailboxes

A shared mailbox was developed by the M365 Admin, and the purpose behind making it was to receive and send emails within a single address. Users need to know this key, that shared mailboxes are configured to be available to different end-users.

For example, your business may have a specific email address for customers seeking reservations or another for those seeking shipping information. You can also assign an email address to a location or situation, such as receiving or shipping. In these cases, many people will likely correct the message and reply to the given address. Setting up a shared mailbox is a perfect way to manage messages when you have multiple users in the same inbox.

Establishing Shared Email Addresses: Step-by-Step Process

Above, we saw the overview of Office 365 shared mailbox limitations, but many users are frequently asked the question, Can I create shared mailboxes efficiently? So, in this part of the phase, we learn the most reliable steps for the same.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Sign in to your Exchange administrator account with your Microsoft 365 global administrator credentials.
2. Then, select the Exchange admin center.
3. After that, expand Recipients from the left pane and select Mailboxes.
4. Now, select + Add a shared mailbox and give a name and email address for the shared mailbox. Then, hit Save Changes.
5. Lastly, use the Add members button>>select Add>>Close.

Exploring Office 365 Shared Mailbox Limitations

There are several limitations to the M365 shared mailbox, which users have faced in recent times.

So, some of them are the following:

1. As we saw above, the limit of shared mailboxes is up to 50 GB, and when your limit will exceeded, any message will not land in your mailbox. Until you free up the space by deleting unnecessary items or archiving old mail.
2. Its maximum sharing message limit is 150 MB, which can have a negative impact on organizations that need to transfer large volumes of data.
3. Any user can access the shared mailbox by providing specific permissions, as it does not have a password security functionality. This is another drawback of it for security purposes.
4. To access the shared mailboxes, users need an M365 license. In addition, it is important to note that shared mailboxes do not provide separate licenses.
5. It will automatically disconnect when any user does not actively perform an activity in it.
6. When you need to see the calendar, you need to open it separately since shared mailboxes do not have their own calendars.
7. Within Outlook, shared mailboxes can’t provide a conversation view, and this can also be a consequence for some users.
8. If a user needs to find the data by searching in shared mailboxes. So, it can be a time-consuming task, as it does not support searching a large amount of data within it.
9. With mobile phones, you can use shared mailboxes, as it does not support working within them. To overcome this drawback, you can use OWA, and after downloading this software, you need to configure it with your primary account. Then, your shared mailbox will be displayed, and you can efficiently work in it.

Final Words

In this comprehensive write-up, we learned about Office 365 shared mailbox limitations. In addition, we covered creating a shared mailbox with easy steps. After that, we discussed the drawbacks of the same. To bypass these consequences, we found professional software to back up the data, which is more reliable than the conventional method.