Office 365: Sending email as an alias, distribution group or as another user
Some of my clients use Office 365 Exchange Online for email. For small businesses with few employees but high email demands (access from multiple devices, long term archiving, etc etc) this makes a lot of sense as it’s simple to implement, reliable and cost effective. Even more so if you harness the power of Office 365 distribution groups (previously called distribution lists) and the ‘SendAs’ feature. In this particular case, each employee within the organisation has their own email account and there’s also a dedicated account for whoever mans the reception; remember with Office 365 you pay on a per account basis so minimising the number of accounts saves money. There are other addresses the business would like to use though, some on a temporary basis (eg: <a client>@business.com) and some on a more permanent basis (eg: [email protected]). This is where distribution groups come in:
Distribution groups are like email aliases for groups, in that you can recieve email at a designated address (eg: [email protected]) and have that message delivered to multiple accounts within the organisation (eg: [email protected], [email protected], etc etc). They’re relatively easy to set up within the Office 365 Exchange interface and there’s plenty of guides online on how to do so. Like here, and here.
Once you’ve got your distribution groups set up and are receiving email into your accounts from a distribution group address ([email protected]) you might be wondering whether users can send emails appearing to come from the distribution group address rather then their actual email addresss. Yes, you can, although to do so you have to specify which users you’d like to give the SendAs permission to. To do this, we use the Windows PowerShell, available for Windows from Windows XP onwards. The instructions below are from here:
Note: In the exmaple below [email protected] is the distribution group email address and [email protected] is the actual email account you want to use when sending emails on behalf of sales@. So in Office 365 lexicon, sales@ is the identity (the distribution group account you’re applying permissions to) and employee@ is the trustee (the account being given permission).
Connect to Exchange via PowerShell
Launch a PowerShell window… then run these commands:
$s = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $Cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Add the SendAs permission to the list
Get-RecipientPermission -Identity [email protected] | Select Trustee, AccessControlType, AccessRights
Using distribution groups wisely will help your orgaisation consolidate email accounts and reduce your yearly subscription fees accordingly. They’re a powerful and simple tool, and should be put to use in any circumstance where you’re paying for the one user to have multiple accounts under the same domain (ie: @business.com).
Office 365: Sending email as an alias, distribution group or as another user was originally published on Pork Belly
