Exchange 2010 Shared Mailbox Sent Items Going Into Personal Mailbox Sent Items Folder

The default behavior of Sent Items when using Send As or Send on Behalf of a Shared Mailbox, is for those sent messages to go into the Sent Items Folder of a user's personal mailbox. This is a problem for auditing heavily used Shared Mailboxes, because you can't readily see sent messages in the Shared Mailbox. Prior to Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4, you had to modify a registry key to force Outlook to save Sent Items in the Shared Mailbox - this would be quite a task if you have a lot of users and/or Shared Mailboxes. Luckily, Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4 and later, provides two (easier) methods to control this behavior...you are running at least SP2 RU4 right?

The first method uses the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to set the values on the Shared Mailbox.

Fire up the EMS, and run:

Get-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration "shared mailbox name"

**Note** Change "shared mailbox name" to the mailbox you need to set the values on

The output will be:

SendAsItemsCopiedTo         : Sender

SendOnBehalfOfItemsCopiedTo     : Sender

Identity                                             :

IsValid                                              : True

We need to change SendAsItemsCopiedTo and SendOnBehalfOfItemsCopiedTo since they are set to the default "Sender".

The options are:

Sender: Sent Items using Send As or Send on Behalf (SOBO) are saved only in the personal mailbox of the user.

SenderAndFrom: Sent Items using Send As or SOBO are saved in the personal mailbox AND the Shared Mailbox.

From: Sent Items using Send As or SOBO are saved in only the Shared Mailbox.

Most users that I have worked with prefer SenderAndFrom, so that's what we'll set here.

To set the values, we need to run:

Set-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration "shared mailbox name" -SendAsItemsCopiedTo SenderAndFrom

And then we'll need to run:

Set-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration "shared mailbox name" -SendOnBehalfOfItemsCopiedTo  SenderAndFrom

If you run Get-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration again, you'll see this output:

SendAsItemsCopiedTo                     : SenderAndFrom

SendOnBehalfOfItemsCopiedTo      : SenderAndFrom

Identity                                              :

IsValid                                               : True

**Note** It may take a while for the changes to take effect depending on your replication times.

The next method is for users to set their own Sent Items behavior in OWA.

**Note** This method only works if the user is running Outlook in online mode, not Cached Mode. In my opinion, with wireless hotspots and fast internet speeds there's no reason to run Cached Mode anyway :)

In the upper-right corner of OWA, hit Options, then See All Options:

 

In the Left Pane, hit Settings, then hit the Sent Items tab. Under Sent Items, select the option you prefer in the two drop-down menus.

 

Now your users' Sent Items will go where they're supposed to.