Folder Sharing in Zimbra Open-Source Edition

Shared mail folders are one of the most sought after business email features. This function allows several people to read letters that fall into the same mailbox at once, and therefore it is widely used in organizing work in the sales and technical support departments. At the request of our reader, we talk about how the function of shared mail folders in Zimbra OSE works and in which cases it should be used.


1. The simplest and most common scenario for using shared mail folders in Zimbra OSE is a shared mailbox for an entire department. Take, for example, an enterprise that has a sales department of five people and a single mailbox sales@zimbra.cloud.loc, which receives requests and questions from customers. The task is to ensure that all employees of the department have access to incoming letters on this mailbox. It is assumed that subsequently employees will enter into correspondence with customers from their personal mailboxes.



In order to accomplish this, it is enough to simply provide each employee with general access to the Inbox folder on the sales@zimbra.cloud.loc mailbox. This is done as follows. In the web client, you must log in with the account sales@zimbra.cloud.loc and alternately grant access to the Inbox folder to each of the employees of the sales department. When granting access, you can select the rights that the user will have on this folder. It would be reasonable for an ordinary employee to give access only to reading data from a folder, and to the department head for its full administration.



When access rights for employees are issued, each of them will receive a letter in the mail with a proposal to add a shared folder to the list of folders in their mailbox. After the offer is accepted, the employee will have a shared folder on the left side of the web client. Having passed it, the employee will be able to view the incoming mail in the sales@zimbra.cloud.loc mailbox and work with these letters as if they had arrived in his own mailbox.



An attentive reader may notice that this approach is not much different from the usual mailing list, but in fact there are still differences. The main one is that, unlike the mailing list, users see if each of the received emails was answered. This minimizes the likelihood that the user will receive two or more responses from different managers on one sent message.

2.Another common use case for using shared mailboxes is internal technical support. For example, technical support of an enterprise with many departments has a single email address TechSupport@zimbra.cloud.loc, to which employees send their applications. Of course, collecting all incoming applications in one box and giving all technical support employees access to it is not an option, since there is an increased risk that the right specialist will miss applications addressed to him in the general flow.



Zimbra OSE mail filters can help to avoid this. They check incoming mail for compliance with any conditions and, depending on the results of the check, performs or does not perform some action. Due to the fact that applications to specialists come from a limited circle of people, you can configure the mail filter so that it automatically sends an incoming application to the folder of the corresponding specialist based on the name of the sender. Thus, after that, all applications received from employees will be automatically distributed in different folders and the administrator will only have to provide specialists with general access to the corresponding folders.



The same can be done from the command line. As in the case of the web client, we first need to grant the user access rights to the folder, and then mount it in the mailbox to which we want to access. To provide access to the folder, use the command zmmailbox -z -m TechSupport@zimbra.cloud.loc mfg "/ TechSupport1" account TechSupport1@zimbra.cloud.loc r . The last attribute in the command means the rights that we grant the user. In addition to read permission ®, you can grant write access (w), create subfolders (i), accept invitations (x), delete items (d), and administer (a). You can mount the folder using the commandzmmailbox -z -m TechSupport@zimbra.cloud.loc cm "/ TechSupport1" TechSupport1@zimbra.cloud.loc "/ TechSupport1" .





A big plus of this option for organizing applications for technical support is that it scales very well and is compatible with all email clients. For example, viewing public folders can be configured in Thunderbird. In order for the shared folder to appear in this mail client, you must log into your account in it and configure it to receive mail via IMAP. Next, you need to subscribe to the shared folder in the account settings, after which the shared folder will be displayed in the general list of mail folders. Similarly, viewing public folders is configured in MS Outlook.





3.In addition, public folders can be used to delegate e-mail while an employee is away. So, for example, if an employee goes on vacation, he can give access to his mail folders to his colleague, who can view incoming mail. Typically, such delegation of a mailbox is accompanied by the granting of the right to send emails on behalf of the user who has granted access to their mail folders.

This is done in the account settings of the employee leaving for vacation and can be done in two ways. In the first case, this is precisely “Sending on behalf of”, in which the recipient of the letter will see that another person is communicating with him from the mail of the person to whom he originally wrote. In the second case, it is “Send as”, in which the recipient of the letter will receive a letter from the person with whom he is talking without any mention of what another person actually answered.



The same can be done on the command line. So, using the command zmprov grr account TechSupport1@zimbra.cloud.loc usr TechSupport2@zimbra.cloud.loc sendAs, we give the user TechSupport1 the right to reply to emails as a user of TechSupport2. Similarly, the commandzmprov grr account TechSupport1@zimbra.cloud.loc usr TechSupport2@zimbra.cloud.loc sendOnBehalfOf instead of the right to send an email as a user, we give TechSupport1 the right to respond to emails on behalf of the TechSupport2 user.

Thus, even if an employee quits or goes on vacation, his mailbox will continue to function, which means that part of the business processes that are tied to the employee and his email will not be interrupted.

For all questions related to the Zextras Suite, you can contact the representative of the company "Zextras" Ekaterina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com