Microsoft Exchange provides multiple ways to control email communication in a business. Shared Mailboxes and Regular mailboxes are two of the many essential mailbox types for organizations. By understanding the differences between these two sorts of mailboxes, businesses may streamline coordination communication and administrative duties.
What is a Regular Mailbox?
The regular mailbox that a user can access is what most people call the Microsoft Exchange mailbox. This type of mailbox assigned to an individual user in an organization has the following contents:
- Email: Sending and receiving emails can be done in the same way as using a mailbox.
- Free Calendar: Scheduled user appointments events and meeting
Address Book: Via the normal address book function found in your mailbox, users can store and organize their personal or business contacts.
- Tasks — Task creation, delegation, and tracking
- Storage: Each mailbox has a specific storage level depending on the Microsoft 365 plan or the on-premises Exchange configuration.
Features of a Regular Mailbox
- Owns access: A regular mailbox is associated with one user A mailbox access is your own unless you specifically grant permissions to others with owner-level (i.e. full access) on it, only people holding the login and password credentials will be able to open it.
- Owns responsibility: Email appointments tasks contacts — All of this is controlled by the mailbox owner.
- User License: To maintain every regular mailbox, a separate Microsoft 365 license is required. That is an important distinction between shared mailboxes which do not require a license to be used.
- Privacy: The data of an individual user who has a regular mailbox is a competence amenity. They created it for their independent use.
Benefits of a Regular Mailbox
- Personal control: Users can not only look after their calendars and tasks but also have full control of their mailboxes.
- Privacy: Private information can be kept securely in the mailbox.
- Priority Features: Personalized workflow and mailbox settings can easily be configured as each user would prefer when not to Demand Regular Mailboxes.
Best use case — Regular mailbox
- Work Personal Email: Each employee carries a distinctive role account for maintaining the employee’s personal function correspondence.
- Executive Mailboxes: This mailbox may be used through the senior management or certain departments to manage and schedule tasks.
- Department Heads: These are the leads or individuals in charge of different departments who need a separate channel for communication.
What is a Shared Mailbox?
A shared mailbox is a mailbox that can be accessed by more than one user to send and receive emails. Shared mailboxes are more advanced than standard mailboxes as they allow various staff to work together in executing tasks from the same mailbox, thus ensuring departmental teamwork. Shared mailboxes are commonly used by customer service teams sales departments and any other group needing to communicate with multiple people.
Features of a Shared Mailbox.
- Multiple Access: A shared mailbox can be a folder that can be accessed by multiple users without sharing the login information. Permissions can be set up so that only certain employees can read, respond to, and manage emails within the shared mailbox.
- User License: Shared mailboxes do not require an individual user license as compared to regular mailboxes. So, it is a cheap solution that can be useful for organizations needing an org-wide email address.
- Single Email Identity: Where the mailbox is a generic email address It becomes easy for the external parties to communicate with the organization since this would be a single email address from which any authorized user can reply.
- Centralized Communication: All messages sent to the shared mailbox remain in one place. This ensures that all who have access remain engaged in responding to messages and no email goes unanswered.
- Calendar Sharing: Share a stakeholder calendar to make scheduling meetings, events, and appointments fit seamlessly with shared mailboxes.
Benefits of Shared Mailbox
- Teamwork: When a shared mailbox is used, not just one team member can deal with incoming and outgoing communications.
- Cost-Efficiency: Since a shared mailbox does not require an individual license, it is a more economical option for teams seeking a channel for group communication.
- Consistency: Even from an external audience perspective, shared mailboxes make sure that all emails are sent from the same email address for internal users, ensuring brand consistency for the clients and customers of the company.
- Multiple Users: Several people may be responsible for processing emails so that no message goes unread or unanswered. This feature is especially useful for customer service & sales teams who need to deal with tons of emails at work.
Best use case — Shared mailbox
- Customer Support Teams: An individual mailbox ensures that each message must be answered by one person (head of team), and this results in a great customer satisfaction level with faster response times.
- Sales Teams: Consolidate common email accounts so all leads and inquiries can be optimally managed by sales reps and no opportunity is missed. Finance / HR /IT, etc. use shared mailboxes to get all the requests invoices, or general inquiries.
- Project-Based Teams: In the projects, teams usually require a more centralized place to communicate, and a shared mailbox solves this issue.
Regular Vs Shared Mailbox
1 Ownership and Access
Regular Mailbox: Associated with only one user and cannot be accessed by anyone other than the mailbox owner unless given explicit permission.
Shared Mailbox: This can be accessed by multiple users and is built to help collaboration without giving out login details.
2. Licensing Requirements
Regular Mailbox: Needs one user license per mailbox. Ideal for staff who manage their own calendars tasks and personal emails.
Shared Mailbox: Licensing is not required for the user mailbox, but you need to assign a license to the user mailbox associated with the shared mailbox if that has more than 50 GB storage or accessing Shared Mailboxes using a Smartphone.
3. Use Cases
Regular Mailbox: Perfect for admins who share the calendar management and admin inboxes.
Shared Mailbox: Great for groups needing a single email address for common areas like questions or requests for help, group communications, etc.
4. Management
Regular Mailbox: By the user, IT admins
A shared mailbox (managed by IT and whose members only give certain rights to it).
5. Email Identity
Regular Mailbox: An email address that has been provisioned to every end-user to send and receive emails
Shared Mailbox: A common email identity used across one team to send and receive emails, for example: [email protected] – here the Screwdriver team uses screwdriver-team.