User email settings in Microsoft 365

As the admin of an organization, there are email settings you can manage on your users. This article gives you information on managing these settings.

Manage email settings

1. Go to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
2. Go to Users > Active users and select the user for whom you would like to manage email settings.
3. In the new pane, select Mail to manage email settings.

Summary of email settings

This table explains the various email settings you can change for a user in Microsoft 365.

Mail setting	Description
Mailbox permissions	Read and manage permissions allows you to set whether people can read and manage other people's mailboxes. You can also set Send as permissions and Send on behalf of permissions permissions for a person. Check out Give mailbox permissions to another user in Microsoft 365 - Admin Help for more details.
Email apps	Email apps allows you to choose the apps a user can use to access their Microsoft email.
Show in global address list	Show in global address list allows you to enable or disable the visibility of the user's mailbox in the organization's address list.
Email forwarding	Email forwarding allows you to add a forwarding email address to a user. You might want to do this if the person has multiple email addresses and they want to receive emails at all their email addresses. Check out Configure email forwarding in Microsoft 365 for more details.
Automatic replies	Automatic replies allows you to set an automatic reply when someone sends an email to the person's email address. You might want to do this if an employee leaves your company and you want to let the email sender know.
More actions	Convert to shared mailbox allows you to convert the user's mailbox to a shared mailbox. You might do this if the person leaves your organization and you want to keep their mailbox data around for a while. Check out Convert a user mailbox to a shared mailbox and Open and use a shared mailbox. Edit Exchange properties allows you to manage additional Exchange Online tasks using the Exchange admin center. Read about managing user mailboxes in Exchange Online. You can turn on Manage litigation hold when you want to retain user mailbox data. Users can purge items from their mailbox, but those items will still be retained by Microsoft 365.

Note

You can only manage email apps for mailboxes that are hosted fully in Microsoft 365. You can't use this feature to manage email apps for mailboxes that are hosted on-premises.