How Shared Mailboxes work with Templafy?

About this article

This article will explain how Shared Mailbox work with Templafy email signature solutions. Sections as below: 

• What's a shared Mailbox?
• Solutions:
  • Solution A - Additional user profiles
  • Solution B - Signature based on the sending Mailbox

Prerequisites

What's a shared Mailbox?

A shared mailbox (or shared inbox) is a mailbox that multiple users can use to read and send email messages. A typical use case would be a support@company.com mailbox. Typically, a shared mailbox is delegated to a user through the Office 365 admin as shown below. This allows users to automatically get shared mailboxes in their Outlook client by being authenticated with their own user. In some cases, shared mailboxes are manually added by the users with the shared mailbox credentials.

Solutions

The Support for shared mailboxes within Templafy is complex and depends on the requirements of the organization. A crucial differentiation is if the organization needs users to get the user profile of the shared mailbox or if they need a separate email signature design for the shared mailbox. In some cases, they might need both. Per this, Templafy provides the two solutions below to work with Shared Mailboxes.

Solution A - Additional user profiles

Relying on additional user profiles that includes the information related to the secondary mailbox (shared mailbox) manually by the end user will allow to get the specific signature of the shared mailbox.

To do so the end users have to follow the steps below:

1. Add the additional user profile.

   How to add an additional user profile?

    

2. Switch to the right signature based on the profile related to the sending mailbox.

   How to switch email signatures?

    

Multiple user profiles can be created in the case of multiple shared mailbox signatures.

Below a breakdown of Advantages and Disadvantages of Solution A - Additional User profiles:

• Advantages
  • Allows for the user to have many different shared inbox signatures by creating multiple profiles.
  • Provide flexibility to have different signatures for the end users to personalize the signature of the shared mailbox based on the sending user.
  • Also allows to cover the use case of Executive assistants sending on behalf of their attached executive.
• Disadvantages
  • Relying on the end user to set these signatures up from their user profiles.
  • It requires manual user action to select the related profile based on the sending mailbox set.

Solution B - Signature based on the sending Mailbox

The email signature server can be used to attach email signatures for shared mailboxes. Per this, the signatures will be added based on the sending mailbox. However, the Templafy email signature add-ins can't be used in this case as they would nullify any attempt by the email signature server to attach the correct email signature. The downside being that users won't see previews of their email signatures, be able to switch between signatures, all the shared mailbox users must be provisioned into Templafy, onboarded and have the O365 signature enabled for them.

Below a breakdown of Advantages and Disadvantages of Solution B - Signature based on the sending Mailbox:

Advantages

• Works on all devices by simply using the From email to determine signature to use.
• Fully automated without having the end user needing to select anything themselves.

Disadvantages

• Requires deployment of Templafy Email Signature Server.
• No email signature previews since Outlook VSTO or Web add-ins would interfere with ESS signatures and cannot be used with this setup.
• Users can only use their default profile signatures.
• All shared mailbox users must be provisioned into the Templafy tenant and have a valid user profile.