Shared Mailbox can have a password and login enabled without license

Spiros Karampinis 

Just worked for me, a horrid way to achieve something that should be possible by default.

So I have an Office 365 tenancy with four company domain names representing two arms of the company trading with different identities however the same shared staff.

So each staff member wants to read and reply but with different email profiles.

1) You cannot create a user called john@companyone.com and then a second user or shared mailbox with john@companytwo.com as "john@" has to be unique within the tenancy.

So the work around to that is create a second user/shared mailbox with john1@companyone.com and go into Exchange ? Shared Mailbox and add in the "john@companytwo.com" under SMTP and make that default and ignore the existence of john2@, you can delete it but Exchange keeps on putting it back.

The next problem is then wanting to create two email profiles, so each company can have its own branding applied. This is where the above trick works because Outlook signature profiles are a direct 1:1 link with accounts and if you're only signing into one account which either has all email going into one address or into the main address and an extra shared mailbox which is only shared with that user you only have one account.

So the above trick which I have just tried, worked and now allows me to login with a second account in Outlook and that in turn will allow me to create a second email signature.

What a hack for a limitation of Outlook. They just need to break the 1:1 link between Accounts and Signature profiles.