Fixed: In Exchange Online, messages sent from a shared mailbox aren’t saved to the Sent Items folder of the shared mailbox

In Microsoft Exchange, shared mailboxes doesn’t require a product license and cannot be added to Outlook as an independent account/mailbox. Basically, You can’t sign in to a shared mailbox. What you normally do it, you sign in to your own account/mailbox, and open the shared mailbox from there.

As the title suggest when you send or reply to a new message from the shared mailbox, Outlook automatically sends or replies from your account (sender’s). Therefore, messages are stored in the Sent Items folder of your (sender’s) mailbox. In this case, a shared mailbox won’t store the outgoing mails in the common shared mailbox which can cause visibility issue specially in a collaboration environment. Nevertheless, we still have an option to manage this hassle.

The following steps will help you to enable the Save a copy feature in Exchange Online Environment.

To do this for a one specific shared mailbox (or very few), you can simply enable it from the Admin UI. Login to Office 365 tenant –> and direct to Admin Center –> Exchange Admin Center –> Groups –> Shared Mailboxes –> Select the Mailbox –> Use tap the option below

Edit the ‘Copied to Mailbox’ options

Enable first option here, or peraps both depends on your needs.

To do it as a bulk for all shared mailboxes, Launch Exchange Online PowerShell Module and Connect to the tenant by signing in as shown below

Connect-EXOPSSession

Once authenticated, you should see an outcome like this

Now let’s get the the current state of the Shared Mailboxes by running this command. It will return the list of Shared Mailboxes that are enabled for sent item copies currently. This means you can revert back this change if required but only to these ones, not for all.

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails shared | Where-Object{$_.messagecopyforsentasenabled -eq ""}

Let’s also get the Mailboxes that are already enabled this feature. In case if we revert this back to its original state, we will have to leave these mailboxes as they were so this would be useful In such situation.

And, we can now run the following all existing Shared Mailboxes to enable it.

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'SharedMailbox')} | set-mailbox -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $True | Where-Object{$_.messagecopyforsentasenabled -eq ""}

Finally , we need to verify if it went well. This command results all sharedmailboxes that are enabled this feature. If it lists down all – you have done it right ! In my case, I only have 4 altogether so it has run perfectly there.

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails shared | Where-Object{$_.messagecopyforsentasenabled -eq "True"}

Reversing this change: In case if you’re in a situation to reverse this change. You can do so in two ways.

To reverse it to original state for a specific one shared mailbox. use this command or Admin UI as explain in the beginning of this article.

set-mailbox testshare2bymanoj -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $False

To reverse it to original state for all shared mailboxes. use this command

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'SharedMailbox')} | set-mailbox -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $False | Where-Object{$_.messagecopyforsentasenabled -eq "True"}

Make sure you disconnect the remote PowerShell session when finished. If you close the Windows PowerShell window without disconnecting the session, you could use up all the remote PowerShell sessions available to you, and you’ll need to wait for the sessions to expire. To disconnect the remote PowerShell session, run the following command.

Remove-PSSession $Session

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