Category: Exchange On-Prem

Organize a Shared Mailbox and aliases using Inbox rules

Quickly configure and manage a shared mailbox using the Outlook for the Web or PowerShell.

Since several versions of Exchange Server and Office 365 you can use shared mailboxes to provide users access to a centralized mailbox.

In this quick post I would like to show how you can easily organize incoming emails if you also have configured different aliases for the shared mailbox.

Let’s say you have a shared mailbox called info@mydomain.com and you have configured several aliases like marketing@mydomain.com and events@mydomain.com.

From there you would like to move incoming mails directly to sub folders in your info@ mailbox. In a shared mailbox this is only possible using the message header. There are two ways to achieve this goal. First using Outlook / Outlook for the web and / or PowerShell. 

CONFIGURATION with Outlook for the Web

Make sure you have the right permissions to manage the mailbox and open the shared mailbox (link to how-to).

Select Settings search for options and choose Message options – Choose your message options

  • Select Inbox and sweep rules and create a new inbox rule
  • Give a Name to the rule. Browse to When the message arrives, and or matches all of these conditions – It includes these words – in the message header – type in your alias for the mailbox (alias@mydomain.com)
  • Browse the condition Do all of the following – Move the message to a folder… Select your folder where the message should be moved to
  • If needed select Stop processing more rules and save (OK) the rule
  • The final result should look like this:

CONFIGURATION with PowerShell

First connect to Exchange Online using PowerShell. If you’re not familiar with connecting to Exchange Online using PoSh. please refer to this link.

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber

If you like to add a new alias to your mailbox, you can use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet like this command:

 Set-Mailbox "info" -EmailAddresses @{add="alias@mydomain.com"}

Use the New-InboxRule cmdlet to organize the shared mailbox by adding new rules. Make sure the subfolders exist in the mailbox:

New-InboxRule -Name ""yourAlias"@mydomain.com - Move to "YourFolderName"" -Mailbox info -HeaderContainsWords "alias@mydomain.com" -MoveToFolder ":\Inbox\YourFolderName" -StopProcessingRules $false

There are much more settings to add. Feel free to post a comment to contribute this post!