Introduction
Delegating access to an email inbox is an excellent way to allow others to send and receive messages on your behalf without sharing login credentials. Example uses cases include: an executive sharing access with their assistant to respond to routine emails, a employee sharing access with a coworker who will be covering them while on extended vacation, and more. Note: if you're considering creating a general inbox for multiple employees to manage, you may want to consider creating a shared mailbox instead.
Setting up delegated access is quick and easy for Exchange administrators.
Steps
1. Login to the Exchange admin center at https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com.
2. In the left-hand sidebar, expand Recipients and click on Mailboxes
3. Find the mailbox you want to delegate access to and select it
4. In the dialog that appears, click on the Delegation tab
5. You'll find three options to choose from: Send as, Send on behalf, Read and manage (Full Access). More than likely, you'll want to choose Read and manage.
6. Click on the Edit button and click Add members in the dialog that appears. Select the member(s) that you want to grant access to and click Save.
7. The changes will be saved and propagated within a few minutes.
8. NOTE: While Read and manage (Full Access) should allow the delegated members to send mail, we've actually experienced cases where we had to explicitly also add them to either Send as or Send on behalf. Otherwise, they would receive an error stating "You don't have permission to send messages from this mailbox", even hours after being granted delegated access and logging out and back in. After adding them to Send as (in our case) and waiting a few minutes, they no longer received the error message.
Conclusion
That's it! You've now granted your user permission to manage another mailbox. If you ever need to remove this access, it's as simple as going to the same page and removing the member. For all of your Microsoft consulting and licensing needs, contact Cosmistack!
