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. You may also want to watch the first several minutes of this training video which has a brief overview on ticketing systems.