Shared mailboxes
A shared mailbox is a team mailbox — support@example.com, contact@example.com — used by several accounts. It is a regular Modoboa account that receives mail like any other one (aliases, filters, antispam and quota included), but nobody logs into it: its members reach it from their own account, with the access level you give them.
Super administrators, resellers and domain administrators manage the shared mailboxes of the domains they administer, from the Shared mailboxes entry of the admin navigation.
Requirement
Shared mailboxes rely on IMAP folder sharing, which must be enabled in Dovecot first: see Requirements.
How members use it
A shared mailbox appears in the webmail of its members, under Shared with me, grouped by mailbox. IMAP clients that support shared folders (the webmail, Thunderbird...) list its folders under shared/<address>/, for example shared/support@example.com/INBOX.
The seen state of messages stays personal to each member: reading a message does not mark it as read for the others.
Creating a shared mailbox
From the Shared mailboxes page (or the Shared mailboxes tab of a domain), click New, then either:
- Create a new account: enter its address, a name and, optionally, a quota (the default quota of the domain otherwise). The account is created like any other one, so the limits of your role apply;
- Share an existing account, typically to turn
contact@example.cominto a team mailbox. Its messages are kept.
An existing account can also be shared from its detail page, in the Shared mailbox tab.
When an account becomes a shared mailbox, nobody can log into it anymore: its password is made unusable, its web sessions end and its API tokens are revoked. The rights it had given on its folders are removed too. As long as it is shared, its password and its role can't be changed, and its PDF credentials document is removed.
Only simple user accounts authenticated by Modoboa can be shared: the accounts of administrators, and accounts authenticated by an external directory (LDAP), can't.
Members
Members come from the domain of the shared mailbox. For each one, choose an access level:
| Level | Members can |
|---|---|
| Read | Read messages. |
| Read and write | Also flag, move, file and delete messages. |
| Read, write and manage folders | Also create and delete subfolders. |
These rights apply to every folder of the mailbox. Members never get the right to share the mailbox again: Modoboa alone manages who accesses it.
Send as lets a member send messages with the address of the shared mailbox: it is offered as a sender address in the webmail, and accepted by the SMTP server. The copies of these messages go to the Sent folder of the member.
Shared mailboxes are highlighted by a Shared badge in the accounts list: click on it to list them only.
Status of the rights
The rights of the members are applied by a background job of the dovecot queue, after each change. Each shared mailbox shows the status of the last run:
- Pending — a change is waiting for the job;
- Ready — the rights are applied;
- Failed — the job failed: the error is shown by hovering the status.
Apply the rights again (in the actions of the list) runs the job once more. A cron job also applies them every 10 minutes, to cover the folders created on the server side (special folders, Sieve filters) — see Background jobs to schedule it.
Stop sharing
Stop sharing turns a shared mailbox back into a regular account: its members lose their access, and the account and its messages are kept. As its password was made unusable, an administrator must set a new one before anybody can log into it.
Deleting the account itself removes the shared mailbox too.
When the license expires
The rights already applied stay in place, so that teams keep their access. Shared mailboxes can't be created or changed anymore, and the rights are not applied again until the plugin is activated.