Introduction

There are instances where you are collaborating with someone on a project and you both need shared access to an email account. There are several solutions to this, which are explained below. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Shared Mailboxes

• Shared mailboxes have an email address that you can receive email to and send email from.
• Your personal email and your shared email will be kept entirely separate - it is like having a secondary email account.
• The email address for shared mailboxes is limited to 8 characters. 
• This is a simple solution when you want a general email inbox for a group of users

Tips

• You will see the additional mailbox as a separate account within Outlook, below your main account

Moira Groups

• Moira groups redirect email to your kerberos (or non-MIT) email address. It is essentially an alias.
• There is a much longer character limit for email addresses (I'm not sure of the exact limit but I haven't run into it)
• Emails sent to the group email address and your personal emails will be mixed together. It is possible to use Outlook rules to automatically organize them.
• You can send mail FROM a Moira group using impersonation, but this requires the use of a separate email client (such as Thunderbird)
• If you do not set up mail to send from a moira group, replies to email will come from your personal kerberos account. This may make tracking issues as a team difficult, because your peer will not see that you have already responded
• Receiving email at this address is very easy to set up; sending email from this address is possible but convoluted

Ticketing/Help Desk System

• A third approach is a ticket system, which uses ServiceNow
• Ticketing systems are superior when you expect to receive a lot of requests that have tasks associated with them (E.g. You are being asked to provide support to a group, you need to coordinate reservations, etc...)
• Emails are sent to a moira group email, then processed by the ticketing system, which notifies you via email at your Kerberos account
• You can reply to these emails when responding to the user just as you would respond to them directly
• All related emails are associated with the specific ticket
• Tickets can have statuses (Open, On Hold, Closed...) as well as custom categories (Work Request/AV, Work Request/Printer Setup, etc...) which can help for reporting purposes in determining where most of your time is spent

Read more about MIT's ServiceNow Ticketing system here.