Shared mailboxes are used when multiple people need access to the same mailbox, such as company information or support email address, reception or other function that can be shared by multiple people. You can also use the shared mailbox as a calendar for shared teams.

In addition, E-mail and documents are traditionally kept in two unique and separate data repositories. Most organizations collaborate with both media. The challenge is that both e-mail and documents are accessed through different clients. This usually results in reduced user productivity and a diminished user experience.

And ...,

• However, a shared mailbox is not designed for direct login. The user account for the shared mailbox itself must remain disabled.
• When too many designated users access a shared mailbox at the same time (no more than 25 is recommended), they may intermittently fail to connect to it or have inconsistencies, such as messages being duplicated in the out mailbox.
• Your shared mailbox can store up to 50 GB of data without assigning a license to it. After that, you need to assign a license to the mailbox to store more data. This is then also limited to 100 GB. When a shared mailbox reaches its storage limit, you can receive e-mail for a while, but you cannot send new e-mail. After that, it stops receiving e-mail. Senders of the mailbox get a receipt without delivery.
• User Permissions: You must give users permissions (membership) to use the shared mailbox. Only people within your organization can use a shared mailbox. You cannot give people outside your company (such as people with Gmail accounts) access to your shared mailbox.
• You cannot encrypt e-mail sent from a shared inbox. This is because a shared mailbox does not have its own security context (username/password), so no key can be assigned to it.

Site post boxes in Microsoft 365

A better alternative is to move to Microsoft 365 groups with Sitepost boxes in SharePoint. Site mailboxes are a common mailbox that allows you to coordinate and keep email messages and documents in one place on a SharePoint site to store all common files. The site mailbox is a solution to this problem. Site mailboxes improve collaboration and user productivity by providing access to both Microsoft SharePoint documents and Exchange e-mail with the same client interface. Functionally, a site mailbox consists of SharePoint title membership (owners and members), shared storage via an Exchange mailbox for e-mail messages and a SharePoint site for documents, and a management interface that meets setup and lifecycle needs.

When a project member submits email or documents using the team mailbox, each project member then has access to the content. Sitepost boxes give users easy access to the email and documents for the projects they are working on and in. In addition, the same set of content can be accessed directly from the SharePoint site itself. With site mailboxes, content is kept where it belongs. Exchange stores e-mail and provides users with the same message view for e-mail conversations that they use every day for their own mailboxes. Meanwhile, SharePoint stores the documents, bringing the cocreation and version of the document to the table. Exchange synchronizes enough metadata from SharePoint to create the document view in Outlook (e.g., document title, date with last change, last modified author, size).

Docubird makes it easy

With Docubird, you can easily add all metadata to these documents, which can be done manually but also fully automated in a process in the background. Docubird can automatically add all relevant email data as metadata to the email making searching for this data very easy.