Mail merge using shared mailbox in Exchange Online

Recently, I wrote a short article on how you can configure a shared mailbox as additional account in Outlook. ​The main reason for doing so was the simple lack of any other resource on the internet that I can reference to when explaining how to work around different limitations of shared mailboxes. I have now updated the article with more detailed information on the different scenarios in which you might want to this method, one of them being when performing a Mail Merge.

The issue was first brought to my attention on a post at Experts Exchange. At this time I was unaware that you are simply not able to use a different From address when performing a mail merge, but it was very easy to test and understand the issue. Outlook will only allow you to use the email address of the default profile, and doesn’t offer any option to change it. So, it seems that the only way to work around this issue is to have the shared mailbox added as additional account in Outlook, and set it as the default one. The person who originally asked for help on this issue was able to verify that adding the shared mailbox as additional account indeed allowed him to solve this, and I have forgotten about it since.

It seems however that this is not that uncommon problem, and sharing it will most likely help others as well. Thus I’m taking this opportunity to put some more visibility on the issue, hopefully the search engines will make it a bit easier to find the solution now that it specifically mentions Mail Merge 🙂

https://www.michev.info/Blog/Post/24/How-to-add-a-shared-mailbox-as-additional-account-in-Outlook

1 thought on “Mail merge using shared mailbox in Exchange Online

  1. PoloQaz says:

    Nice short article. However I have similar issue – same company, same user two different domains and the scenarion looks like this: name.surname@abc-d.com need to be merged to name.surname@abc.com and once this completed all email sent to @abc-d.com need to be forwarded to @abc.com. Any suggestion – please.

    Reply

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