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JonMercer-8382 asked JonMercer-8382 edited

Exchange 365 Shared Mailbox Passwords Issue

For some reason mostly after we setup people on Azure AD Connect, every week or three (it seems a bit random per person) Outlook comes up wanting us to login to all the mailboxes that are shared with multiple people. They are classified as UserMailbox. It works for a week or three, and then they all want it again.

It is like there is something that says every two weeks, require logging in to the mailboxes. Is there a way to get this to stop? It is a hassle for local people, it is a major pain putting in passwords in remote people's system due to a decent amount of latency on their home systems, that are a couple states away from us.

They have no issue with their personal account.

All the shared accounts have Exchange Online (Plan 1) license, and some have Azure Information Protection Premium P1

When I put the password back in, I select for this application only, because a while back there was an issue with selecting the Ok. Could this cause what we are seeing, or is it something with Azure AD Connect? The only difference with them are they are M365 only, they are not tied to our AD server.

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ChristyZhang-MSFT avatar image ChristyZhang-MSFT ·

Hi @JonMercer-8382 ,

Welcome to our forum!

Please kindly understand under Outlook tag, we mainly focus on general issues about Outlook desktop client. Considering that your issue may be more related to Exchange, I would add "office-exchange-online-itpro" tag under your post to solve it better.

Thanks for your understanding and hope your issue would be resolved soon.

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1 Answer

michev avatar image
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michev answered JonMercer-8382 edited

Why are you provisioning shared mailboxes with passwords? This is not a supported scenario and can be considered a license agreement breach. If you want users to access them as "additional account" in Outlook, which does enable some functionalities, just grant Full Access permissions and have the users enter their own credentials if/when prompted.
AAD Connect/Hybrid should not be a problem here, you can have remote shared mailboxes, no password required.

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JonMercer-8382 avatar image JonMercer-8382 ·

They need to be able to have their own signatures and rules in Outlook. What kind of license would be needed to not be in violation, if there is one.

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michev avatar image michev JonMercer-8382 ·

You don't need a separate license for this, or make any changes to the shared mailbox. Just add the shared mailbox as additional account (via File > Add account > enter your own credentials when prompted). Detailed steps here: https://www.michev.info/Blog/Post/2025/how-to-add-a-shared-mailbox-as-additional-account-in-outlook-2016-build-8431-and-above-on-windows-10-1709-and-above
If you change the password for a shared mailbox and login to in directly, you're effectively using it as "regular" user mailbox, thus you need to have at least Exchange Online Plan 1 license assigned. However, that's really not necessarily as the method outlined above allows you to add it in Outlook while exposing all the functionalities.

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KaelYao-MSFT avatar image KaelYao-MSFT JonMercer-8382 ·

Hi @JonMercer-8382

As michev mentioned, if you would like to create signatures and mailbox rules for shared mailbox in Outlook, you need to add the shared mailboxes as additional account instead of using automapping.
The detailed steps are introduced in this link: Add rules to a shared mailbox

Once the shared mailbox is added as an additional account, you would be able to create rules and signatures for it.
There is no need to assign additional license to the shared mailbox.

Account settings:
152492-58.png
In signatures you can now select shared mailbox:
152483-59.png
Rules:
152501-60.png

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KaelYao-MSFT avatar image KaelYao-MSFT KaelYao-MSFT ·

Hi @JonMercer-8382

Just checking in to see if above information was helpful. Please let us know if you would like further assistance.
If the issue has been resolved, please accept the helpful replies as answers, this will make answer searching in the forum easier and be beneficial to other community members as well.

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JonMercer-8382 avatar image JonMercer-8382 KaelYao-MSFT ·

No it doesn't. Your examples are what we already do. The issue is, is that they get added as a new mailbox, and after a while, all at once they ask for the password. I could add 4 shared mailboxes, each with either an Exchange Online Plan 1 or E3 license, and each with their own password, and they will all at some random time ask for the password. This started happening as soon as Azure connect kicked in, and their account because an Azure Hybrid, and modern authentication kicked in.

Something I am trying is to say ok instead of just for this application after putting in the password, to see if that helps any. Was doing just this application before, because it was failing if I clicked ok, and was told by Msoft support that we need to use for this app only since the accounts were not Azure linked at the time.

The passwords are not changing, it seems like Outlook/Teams/OneDrive on my Android phone for my personal work email, where at random it says I need to login to the account again.

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KaelYao-MSFT avatar image KaelYao-MSFT JonMercer-8382 ·

Thanks for your update.

However, according to your post, you are using normal user mailboxes as share mailboxes.
We recommended in former replies that you can create shared mailboxes directly (it doesn't need seperate licenses) and assign full access permission to users, so they can access the mailbox with their own credentials instead of using the credentials of the current "shared mailboxes".


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