There may be times where you may need to grant an IT administrator or other employees access to another user’s mailbox.
Below I will demonstrate how to:
- Grant an Admin access to a single mailbox
- Grant an Admin access to all mailboxes
- Revoke the above permissions (recommended cause of action after the Administrator has finished his/her tasks)
- First make sure you have the remote signed execution policy set to true. You can do this by running PowerShell in admin mode and running:Â Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
- Next, run the following to authenticate your self and import PowerShell commands to your local session:
$LiveCred = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange-ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session
Grant an Admin access to a single mailbox
Add-MailboxPermission [email protected] -User [email protected] -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Grant an Admin access to all mailboxes
Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'UserMailbox') -and (Alias -ne 'Admin')} | Add-MailboxPermission -User
[email protected]
 -AccessRights fullaccess -InheritanceType all
Revoke the above permissions
- If you want to revoke permissions after granting them, simply replace the ‘Add-MailboxPermission‘ with ‘Remove-MailboxPermission‘ followed by the original command you entered to grant the permissions. For example, to grant [email protected] full access to [email protected], you would enter the command:
Add-MailboxPermission [email protected] -User [email protected] -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
- To revoke [email protected] from viewing [email protected], you would enter the command:
Remove-MailboxPermission [email protected] -User [email protected] -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
There is a switch you can use in conjunction with the above commands which will hide the user mailboxe from appearing in the mailbox-tree panel in Outlook (on the left side).
-AutoMapping $false