If your team sends emails from a shared mailbox using Send As, there’s a critical detail you might be missing. Those emails are not saved in the shared mailbox’s Sent Items. Instead, they are stored in each user’s personal mailbox. This means the shared mailbox ends up showing little to no sent history, even though emails are being sent regularly.
Conversations become scattered across individual mailboxes. Piecing together a complete thread becomes difficult. There’s no single, reliable place to track what was actually sent on behalf of the team. Everything appears to work fine on the surface, until someone asks for past communication. And that’s when the problem becomes impossible to ignore.
Why Sent Items Aren’t Saved by Default in Shared Mailboxes
Before diving into the fix, it’s worth understanding the two ways users can send from a shared mailbox, because the behavior differs slightly for each.
Send As – Send As permission lets users send emails directly from the shared mailbox address. Recipients see no indication that an individual sent it. The recipient sees From: support@contoso.com, there’s no indication that an individual sent it. The sent message is stored in the sender’s personal Sent Items folder, not in the shared mailbox.
Send on Behalf – Send on Behalf works differently. Recipients see a From header like: ‘Jane Smith on behalf of support@contoso.com. Same issue, the sent message goes into the sender’s Sent Items, not the shared mailbox.
In both cases, by default, the shared mailbox’s Sent Items folder remains untouched, which defeats much of the purpose of having a shared mailbox for team communication.
Now, let’s see how to save sent items in a shared mailbox without losing data.
How to Save Copies of Sent Items in Shared Mailbox
To save copies of emails sent from a shared mailbox into that shared mailbox’s Sent Items folder (rather than just the personal mailbox of the sender), you can use the following methods.
1. Manage Shared Mailbox’ Sent Items Setting in Microsoft 365 Admin Center
As a global administrator, follow the steps below to ensure sent items are saved in a shared mailbox. This works well for a one-off change on a single mailbox. It’s the most accessible option for admins who don’t use PowerShell regularly.
- Log in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Navigate to Teams & groups > Shared mailboxes.
- Select the specific shared mailbox you want to modify.
- In the properties pane, find the Sent items section and click Edit.
- Check the box for Copy items sent as this mailbox (for “Send As” permissions) and/or Copy items sent on behalf of this mailbox (for “Send on Behalf” permissions).
- Click Save.
What makes this even more confusing is that the checkbox is only exposed in the Microsoft 365 admin center and not in the Exchange admin center. Given that this is an Exchange-specific setting, you’d naturally expect to manage it there. Instead, admins often end up hunting across portals to locate something that should be much easier to find.
2. Save Sent Items in Shared Mailbox Using PowerShell
If you need to update multiple mailboxes or prefer the command line, use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet after connecting to Exchange Online. PowerShell is the right choice when you need to update multiple shared mailboxes at once, or when you want to script this as part of a shared mailbox provisioning process.
Configure save sent items for a single mailbox:
Set-Mailbox -Identity "support@contoso.com" -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $true Set up a shared mailbox to save messages “Sent on behalf”:
Set-Mailbox -Identity "support@contoso.com" -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $true If you have multiple shared mailboxes and want to apply this to all of them at once:
# Get all shared mailboxes and enable both settings
Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails SharedMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | ForEach-Object {
Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.Identity `
-MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled $true `
-MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled $true
Write-Host "Updated: $($_.PrimarySmtpAddress)"
}Powerful as it is, PowerShell still requires the right commands, permissions, and context, making even simple configurations less accessible for everyday admin tasks.
3. Fix It the Easy Way: Configure Shared Mailbox Sent Items with EasyEntra
If PowerShell feels like overkill, the UI isn’t much better. The Microsoft 365 admin center spreads settings around and places options like this outside the Exchange admin center, making a simple task harder than it should be.
EasyEntra is an administration portal designed to surface exactly these kinds of buried Microsoft 365 settings in a clean, accessible interface, no PowerShell required.
In EasyEntra, configuring the Sent Items copy behavior for a shared mailbox is as simple as opening the mailbox settings and ticking a checkbox.
For Send As:
Navigate to the Mailbox tab of a shared mailbox in EasyEntra → open the Mailbox Delegation tab → find the ” Save a copy of Send As messages to Sent Items” option → Enable with a single toggle.
For Send on Behalf:
Similarly, to configure this for Send on Behalf, follow the same path. Open the Mailbox tab, go to Mailbox Delegation, and find “Save a copy of Send on Behalf messages to Sent Items” and enable the setting.
EasyEntra also supports bulk actions, making it easy to apply the same configuration across multiple mailboxes. Simply select multiple users or shared mailboxes at once, right-click to open Properties, navigate to Mailbox Delegation, and enable the required settings in one go. This eliminates repetitive manual work and ensures consistent configuration across your environment.
That’s it. No PowerShell, no module installation, and no risk of running a bulk command against the wrong set of mailboxes.
If your organization relies on shared mailboxes for customer communication, team correspondence, or any purpose where a complete, centralized sent history matters, this is a setting you can’t afford to leave at its default!
