Office 365 provides great flexibility and options for mail delivery. For emails to be sent / received there has to be a storage container called Mailbox which is responsible to store emails / calendar meetings / lists / notes, etc.
Breakdown of Office 365 Mailbox Types
With Office 365, you have the ability to create different types of mail accounts for your unique needs. Some of these account types require a paid license while others don’t.
The types of mail accounts you can create include:
Mailbox (License Required)
Shared (Free)
Resource (Free)
Here’s an overview of the Office 365 mailbox types you can choose from:
Mailboxes
Licensed mailboxes were designed for personal mail, devices and programs and require a login. Each person in your organization who needs an email account will have an Office 365 mailbox.
User Mailboxes
User mailboxes are Exchange mailboxes connected with individuals, with generally one mailbox per person.
Each user mailbox is connected with an Active Directory account, which allows the user access to the mailbox to send and receive email messages and schedule meetings and appointments.
The storage limit of a user mailbox with a license is 50 GB which is also called as Plan 1.
You can get the exchange email services with subsections as Business Basic, Business Standard / Premium, Enterprise Subscription. However, we need to understand that the Exchange Email Plan comes with two different plans
Exchange Online Plan 1 [50 GB]
Exchange Online Plan 2 [100 GB]
Shared Mailboxes
A shared mailbox is an inbox in which several persons may send and receive emails from the same address. This is ideal for a business that wants to share the burden of responding to consumer questions.
An email sent to the shared address can be responded to by any member of the shared mailbox. And any responses will look as though they were sent from the shared mailbox address rather than the individual user.
Shared mailboxes are free with 50 GB Storage of storage and make it easy for a specific group to monitor and send email from a public email.
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. You can also use the shared mailbox as a shared team calendar.
So when would you need shared mailboxes?
Let’s say you have a generic email address on your website for sales@company.com that you want five people in your organization to receive. For the sales account. You can also simplify this process by creating shared mailboxes. Indeed, it’s much easier on your company technicians!
An email sent to the shared address can be responded to by any member of the shared mailbox. And any responses will look as though they were sent from the shared mailbox address rather than the individual user.
Resource OR Equipment Mailbox
Also known as a room mailbox, these free mailboxes are used for reserving and coordinating rooms and equipment.
When users elect to add a resource to a meeting appointment via their calendar, a reservation is placed on the resource for that time period. When users create a calendar event, they can check a resource’s availability.