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.
• Shared email addresses are limited to 8 characters.
• Your personal email and your shared email will be kept entirely separate - it is like having a secondary email account
• This is a simple solution when you want a general email inbox for a group of users
• You will see the additional mailbox as a separate account within Outlook, below your main account
• Takes a few days to set up

Moira Groups/Moira Lists

• Moira lists forward email to another email address. For example, email sent to your-list-name@mit.edu can be forwarded to your-keberos@mit.edu.
• Mail can be forwarded to any email address - it does not need to be an @mit.edu email account
• There is a 255-character(?) limit for moira list email addresses
• Because email sent to the Moira list will be forwarded to your personal email account, moira list emails will be mixed together with your personal emails. You can configure Outlook rules to automatically organize moira list emails into folders.
• You can send mail FROM a Moira list using impersonation, but this requires the use of a separate email client (such as Thunderbird). See this kb article for setup instructions.
• If you do not set up thunderbird, replies to moira list emails 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
  • Your replies will be kept on your local computer only, not on the cloud since there is no real account to store them with
• Receiving email at this address is very easy to set up; sending email from this address is possible but takes a little bit of effort

Ticketing/Help Desk System

• A third approach is to use a ticketing system, such as 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 address and processed by the ticketing system. The system then notifies you about the inquiry (and any replies to the thread) via email.
• You can reply to notification emails from the ticketing system just as you would respond to a user directly and they will receive the email
• All related emails are associated with the specific ticket
• All correspondence can be viewed on the ServiceNow website, and you can made additional notes that are not visible to the client
• Tickets can have statuses (Open, On Hold, Closed...) as well as custom categories (Work Request/AV, Work Request/Printer Setup, etc...)
• Provides substantial reporting capabilities (See the number of requests, when they come in, the type of requests, average time to resolution...)

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.

Contact Relationship Management (CRM) System  - On the roadmap; not implemented yet

• A Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system is used to keep a history of interactions your organization has with individuals and organizations
  • Interactions can include emails, phone calls, events they have attended, donations they have made, social media posts they have interacted with, and more
• Similar to a ticketing system, but more focused on the relationship you have with an individual as opposed to a task-based workflow
• Provides substantial reporting data
• Expected to be available sometime in 2024-2025