shared mailbox

What is a shared mailbox?

A shared mailbox is an inbox that allows multiple people to send and receive email from the same address. This is great for a company that might want to share the load of responding to customer inquiries, for example. Any member of the shared mailbox may respond to an email sent to the shared address. And any response will appear as if sent from the shared mailbox address, rather than the individual person.

Say Molly sets up questions@mollysbarkandwine.com, and adds her partners, Jane and Paul, as members. Whenever any of the three reply to a questions@ email, the response will come from questions@mollysbarkandwine.com, instead of from Molly, Jane, or Paul’s individual email addresses.

Because a shared mailbox is an entire inbox, the members have a common calendar, and contacts list. A shared mailbox allows a certain amount of email storage, without needing to pay more.

A shared mailbox technically has no owner, and it doesn't have its own password. So, members aren't able to log in to the shared mailbox, directly. The admin has to add you as a member of the shared mailbox, and then you can access it, either online or through an email client.

 Easy way to understand : 

 ****A distribution group***

         1. Has owners

         2. delivery management(just only inside or both outside)

         3. not provide a common calendar

         4. membership approval (add new member by owner...)

 ****A shared mailbox***

         1. no has owners

         2. sender is everyone

         3. provide a common calendar

         4. When a person in the group replies to a message sent to the shared mailbox, the email appears to be from the shared mailbox, not from the individual user.

More : 

In summary, the most difference is that a shared mailbox has mailboxes, while a distribution group doesn’t .

The main reason to use distribution groups is as follows:

1. They make it easy to send an email message to lots of people at once.

2. They help people inside and outside your organization communicate and collaborate more easily. You can specify which users in your organization can send email to a distribution group. You can also specify whether users outside of your organization can send email to a distribution group.

3. If you or someone in your organization sends email to a lot of users at once, you can choose to send to a distribution group, so you  won’t exceed the maximum number of recipients per message.

The possible reason to use shared mailboxes is as follows:

Shared mailboxes are a great way to handle customer email questions because several people in your organization can share the responsibility of monitoring the mailbox and responding to the questions. Your customer questions get quicker answers, and related emails are all stored in one mailbox.

Note: If a member wants to use a shared mailbox, the member  needs a permission of Full Access. What’s more, the  storage of a shared mailbox is 50GB, while, the maximum number  of distribution group users is 100,000.