Office 365 Mail flow & shared mailboxes have a lot of lingo being tossed around.  IT resources on the inter-webs throw out the expression “Transport service in Office 365” on top of it and your head is spinning.

Don’t worry, we break it down to the bare essentials so you can improve your organization’s workflow, maybe solve a couple IT puzzles, and have that amazing aha moment when you find a solution that’s been bugging you. We will help connect connect the dots where Shared Mailboxes come in handy with email redirects in the transport rules section of Exchange.

We will show off a couple things that mailflow can do before getting crazy with the lingo.  By definition, the transport pipeline is a collection of services, connections, and components, and queues that work together to route all messages to the categorizer in the transport service in Office 365 on an Exchange Mailbox server inside the organization.  Want to nerd it out more?  Defer to Microsoft docs for more details.  Have some specific goals in mind for processing email, stick around here.

Exchange Admin Portal

Want to block or delete an external email from coming into your organization?

Got a spammy vendor?  Here are the steps to block or delete their email from your organization.  In this case, we blocked Webroot marketing email since their unsubscribe feature does not work.

Office 365 Mail flow & shared mailboxes

 

 

 

 

I circled all the options necessary to get your new rule up and running.  Though, applying the block to an external email productupdates@webroot.com can be a bit confusion for first time setup.  See the next illustration for where to add the external email address.

Office 365 Mail flow & shared mailboxes

Add external email to transport rule.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avoid Office 365 licensing and have your incoming email redirect to an external email like FreshDesk

Note:  This is different than placing a forwarder on emails.

You are Acme Org.  You have an email customerservice@acme.org.  You wish to take a third-party platform to not only be you incoming email by company but maybe provide a ticketing system.  Every dollar counts at Acme.org.  Office 365 Mail flow & shared mailboxes require a specific steps performed first.  Setup a shared mailbox as discussed above first.  Then setup a redirect in the Mail Flow section of Office 365 Exchange.  Head over to the Exchange Admin Center:  https://outlook.office365.com/ecp

 

Transport Rules

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When working with the transport service in Office 365, remember that Mail flow & shared mailboxes require certain steps to be in order if you want email redirected to an external email address. Head back to the “dashboard” if you have not created a Shared Mailbox first.

Office 365 Mail flow & shared mailboxesOffice 365 Mail flow & shared mailboxes

 

 

 

Want more help articles on Office 365? We’ve got you covered! Check out these articles below for all the answers you need.