Adding shared mailbox to Thunderbird via IMAP

[rocky7x]

Hello,

We have an exchange 2007 server which hosts all our mailboxes to which we login via our domain accounts. Every user has his own default mailbox, but there is a number of shared mailboxes as well, to which some users have access. The question is: how can the user who has access also to an exchange shared mailbox map it in Thunderbird via IMAP?

The problem is that when I create an IMAP account, call it as Shared Mailbox and put the e-mail address of it, I still have to login to it with my own domain username, but that always opens my default exchange mailbox. How can I force thunderbird to ask for that shared mailbox on exchange?

Thank you very much.
Regards,
Rocky

[bkennelly]

Try opening the Subscribe dialogue ("File->Subscribe"). The shared folders should be listed there for the Exchange account, and can be subscribed.

[rocky7x]

In File->Subscribe you only have folders that are related to the mailbox to which you connect on exchange, in this case to my default mailbox. What I need is somehow force thunderbird access a different mailbox than by own, and then I would have a different set of folders to subscribe to.

Any idea?

[bkennelly]

It will depend on your server. I was thinking of Public shared folders when I answered, which appear in my subscription list under "Public Folders".
I do not know how, or if, Exchange exposes other users' shared folders. The key is to get the namespace right. You can see the namespace being used in the Advanced setting from the Server Settings page.
We do not use shared folders, so I cannot take it any further. The Exchange server I am using returns NIL for the "other users" namespace, which results in an empty box.

[bkennelly]

I found the following article; http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311468
I do not know if they fixed it in later releases.

[cjb123]

was there any progress made on this? our school is transitioning to an exchange 2007 server, and most users are familiar with thunderbird. so far, I haven't seen a method to connect TB to non-user/shared accounts...

[tanstaafl]

There is a difference between trying to access public shared folders and other users mailboxs. Thunderbird has explicit support for connecting to shared public folders. Whether you can use that to access somebody elses mailbox instead depends upon what the IMAP server does and whether the admin set file permissions for that other users mailbox to allow you to access them.

Set the mailbox location of public folders in tools -> account settings -> server settings-> advanced -> "public (shared)" if they aren't listed in your subscription window.

[Guest]

ping png

[agarden]

Make another account and use the same settings, just changing the username to be as follows: domain name/username/mailbox

Where mailbox is the name of the additional shared mailbox.

Tested against Exchange 2003.