Question regarding the read or unread mark in Outlook when using shared mailboxes

Question

Hello experts,

as part of planning a migration to Office 365, a customer which is currently using an On-Prem Lotus Domino asked us a question about how Outlook handles the read or unread mark when using shared mailboxes.

Currently, in Lotus Domino read marks on messages are user based and it is a built in function of domino as it is part of view system.

As far as I know, the read or unread mark in Outlook when using shared mailboxes is stored in the mail document and, as a result, I don't know of any workaround for this in Outlook.

Is my understanding correct ?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,

Massimiliano

Answer 1

Your understanding is correct. Per-user Read counts are not possible in Shared Mailboxes.

Some work-arounds:
https://exchange-server-guide.blogspot.com/2016/11/shared-mailbox-in-outlook-message-read-unread.html

Alternatively, you can use Public Folders or Office 365 Groups which do maintain per-user read counts.

There is also a user voice topic where you can vote to add this ability for shared mailboxes

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-admin/suggestions/19440886-maintain-per-user-read-unread-information-on-a-sha

Answer 2

Hi @Massimiliano Rizzi ,
Agree with Andy, I also have tried to test on my environment and found the status of message would be synced in others' client when a user read it, and we indeed couldn't set per-user read\unread status for a shared mailbox.
As a supplement, I tried many workarounds about this issue, and according to my tests, setting the Conditional Formatting rule by the customed categories would be more effective to help us distinguish those messages that have been read by all members like below.

If you think it's helpful to you, for detailed information about how to set it, please refer to this article: Who has already read that message in our shared mailbox?(Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.)

Hope that would be helpful to you.

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Answer 3

One of the administrative assistants at my firm had this question and she discovered that if she just turned off the preview pane she could still scroll through the emails in the shared mailbox without them being marked as read.

Answer 4

Hi anonymous userDavid and @Jade Liang-MSFT ,

thank you very much for taking the time to reply to my question, much appreciated.

Regards,

Massimiliano

Answer 5

@Jade Liang-MSFT

How did you make the Read and reed setup like in that Screenshot?