pCall us: 905-339-0006
minding your systems

Accessing a Shared Mailbox in Outlook 2016 for Mac

21 Jul 2017
Mac, Office 365
Comments: 0

Shared Mailboxes aren’t discovered and displayed in Outlook 2016 for the Mac like they are in the Windows version. In order to access them you have to do the following:

  • Open Outlook
  • Click “Tools.”
  • Click “Accounts.”
  • Select your Office 365 email account (or on premise if that’s what you have)
  • Click “Advanced…”
  • Click on “Delegates” to display the tab.
  • Click the plus button under “People I am a delegate for:”
  • Type the name of the Shared Mailbox in the Search box on the “Choose a Person” dialog
  • Click “Add” to add the Shared Mailbox
  • Click “OK”
  • Close the “Accounts” dialog

The shared mailbox should appear in the folder list at left shortly.

Watch out for fake emails from Office365 and other services

13 Mar 2017
Office 365, Security
Comments: 0

Is that email saying that your online account real or fake? Sometimes it’s pretty easy to figure out. Here’s one that I received today.

Email with a fake hyperlink

The link in this email does not point to Office 365

Whenever I receive something like this with a link on the page, the first thing I do is hover the mouse pointer over it. Doing so in Outlook displays the full web address. As we can see here that address obviously has nothing to do with Office 365.  The “wp-content” part of that even tells us that it’s from a WordPress site that has probably been hacked.

Why did someone send this?

The easy answer is that they are trying to capture your login information. Sometimes it’s to get at financial information but it can also be to have access to a real email account to perform even more significant fraud. This could include sending invoices to your accounts payable department for payment or sending everyone a virus.

What do I do if I think it might be legitimate?

If you are concerned that there may be a reason why the service is trying to get in touch with you then the best thing to do is simply go to what you know to be the correct link like https://portal.office.com and if there are real account notifications a good service will inform you when you login.

O365 – Convert ADSync User Mailbox to Shared and Remove User from AD

27 Feb 2016
Office 365
Comments: 0

Many people have documented converting a user mailbox into a shared one with the quick link in the Exchange Admin section of Office 365 but converted mailboxes remain in the user list with the status of “Synced with Active Directory”

Because of this is that even though you free up an Office 365 license if you delete the user from your on premise server you lose the shared mailbox. Having a bunch of inactive users in your local AD just to keep shared mailboxes is annoying and potentially confusing unless you create a new OU for them. The most common suggestion I’ve seen for being able to delete them is to export the mailbox to a PST using Outlook and then copying the contents back to a newly created shared mailbox with the same name afterwards.

During the process of doing some clean up work it occurred to me to try restoring one of these mailboxes from the “Deleted Users” screen. I already had the local PST so if it didn’t work it would be OK. The result was a normal user mailbox with the Status “In Cloud” and assigned a license.  Once again I converted this mailbox back to a shared one and removed the license to end up with a Shared mailbox that isn’t associated with an AD user.

Here were the steps I followed:

  1. Export to PST (doing this on the user’s computer by taking control of the account is the easiest)
  2. Convert User Mailbox to Shared (status is still Synced)
  3. Delete user from AD
  4. Force AD Sync
  5. Restore user from Deleted Users (recreated user status is In Cloud)
  6. Convert User Mailbox to Shared
  7. Remove License.

Step 2 may not be necessary and I’ll update this when I have an opportunity to test.

This may be a lucky hack so don’t try this without having your backup first!