We just upgraded to Exchange 2007 at the end of the last week and ran in to one wrinkle with accessing a shared, team mailbox on our mobile phones through IMAP.

A little background

Our practice for creating and managing “shared” mailboxes using Exchange 2003 (I use the quotes to distinguish between the new Shared mailbox type in Exchange 2007), has been to create a regular AD account, e.g. “X-BAR Support Team”, stripped of any special security access, with a complex, don’t-need-to-remember password; create a separate ACL security group, e.g. “X-BAR Support Team ACL”, to which we added team members who needed access the mailbox; then grant the ACL security group Full Mailbox and Send As permissions (careful: Send on Behalf and Send As are not the same). That way, employees could access to the “shared” mailbox using Outlook or OWA. No fuss no muss.

Under Exchange 2003, we were able to use our individual domain credentials to access the “shared” mailbox using IMAP, which meant one less user name and password to manage (and one less password to change when an employee departs).

The problem

Apparently, Exchange 2007 no longer supports this:

…POP3 and IMAP4 clients cannot use the DomainName\Username\Alias format to log on to the Exchange Server server. 

Exchange 2007 no longer supports the ability to log on to another user’s mailbox by using POP3 or IMAP4.

Full details are available in Microsoft KB article 937359.

So, we’ve decided to leave our “shared” mailbox as a regular user account with attached mailbox (vs. converting it to a new Shared mailbox in Exchange 2007), and make the credentials for the account available to team members. This will keep folks connected and working, but’s it certainly less elegant.

Posted by Brad Benner in Technical on 5 January 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.