In order to use your own email address for sending emails and responding to tickets, you need to connect it to LiveAgent as an outgoing email account. Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes are a special type of mailbox. Unlike regular mailboxes, shared mailboxes do not have their own credentials to sign in with. Instead, they are accessed and managed by multiple users through their regular Microsoft 365 accounts.
This difference also applies to the connection process. When connecting a shared mailbox, you sign in with your regular Microsoft user account, choose that you want to connect a shared mailbox, and grant the LiveAgent application consent to read the users of your Microsoft tenant, so it can verify that the shared mailbox exists. Emails are then sent from the shared mailbox's address, authenticated through your user account.
Preparing your Microsoft account and shared mailbox
Before connecting the shared mailbox, ensure that the Microsoft user account you will authenticate the connection with has the "Authenticated SMTP" email app permission enabled.
Afterward, ensure that your user account is a member of the shared mailbox with the "Send as" permission, which allows it to send emails from the shared mailbox's address. If you also plan to connect the shared mailbox as an incoming email account, grant the "Read and manage" permission as well.
Note: Every email sent from the shared mailbox is authenticated through the Microsoft user account that established the connection. If this user account is later deleted, disabled, or loses the "Send as" permission, LiveAgent can no longer send emails from the shared mailbox.
Connecting the shared mailbox
Once the Microsoft user account and shared mailbox are prepared, navigate to Configuration > Email > Outgoing Email Accounts, click "Integrate new email account", and select the "Microsoft" connector in the connection window.
Note: The mandatory permission to read all users of a tenant requires Microsoft admin consent, which can be granted only by a Microsoft Global Administrator or another administrator allowed to grant tenant-wide consent (regardless of LiveAgent role). If your Microsoft role is not sufficient, either complete the whole connection via an administrator's account, or complete the step where you sign in via your account, then have an administrator grant the consent, and then continue with the next shared mailbox verification step.
Tip: When granting the consent, Microsoft administrators can check the "Consent on behalf of your organization" option right in the authorization window. With this tenant-wide consent in place, any Microsoft user of your organization can connect further shared mailboxes to LiveAgent without an administrator's help.
In the next "Connect new Microsoft account" screen, click "Connect". A Microsoft authorization window pops up, where you sign in with the regular Microsoft user account prepared in the previous step.
After you authorize yourself, the Microsoft window closes automatically, and LiveAgent asks which mailbox you want to connect. Select "Shared mailbox", enter the shared mailbox's address into the "Email address of shared mailbox" field, and click "Verify".
Granting consent to verify the shared mailbox
After clicking "Verify", a Microsoft window opens once again. Here, LiveAgent requests the permission to read all users of your Microsoft tenant, which it uses to check that the entered shared mailbox exists. It is required to sign in with the same Microsoft account through which you authenticated in the previous step.
Finishing the integration
Once the shared mailbox is verified, confirm the integration by clicking "Integrate" in the next screen. Lastly, decide whether the outgoing email account should be available to all departments, or only to selected departments.
That's it, your Microsoft 365 shared mailbox is connected, and you can start sending emails from it. To also fetch emails from the shared mailbox to LiveAgent, see the guide on connecting Microsoft 365 shared mailbox as an incoming email account.
Troubleshooting
If the shared mailbox cannot be connected, LiveAgent displays one of the following messages:
- "Shared email address is not valid" - the entered text is not a valid email address.
- "Shared email is not valid" - no mailbox with the entered address exists in your Microsoft tenant. Check the address for typos, and make sure the shared mailbox belongs to the same tenant as your user account.
- "Failed to verify shared mailbox" - LiveAgent could not look up the shared mailbox, most commonly because a different Microsoft account was used in the consent window than in the first authorization window. Click "Verify" again and sign in with the same account.
- "Unable to receive authentication token" - the Microsoft authorization from the first step is no longer valid. Start the connection again.
- "Unable to authenticate." - Microsoft rejected the SMTP sign-in of your user account, typically because the "Authenticated SMTP" email app is not enabled for it.
The verification only confirms that the shared mailbox exists in your Microsoft tenant. It does not check the permissions of your user account. If your user account lacks the "Send as" permission for the shared mailbox, the integration succeeds, but sending emails from it fails.