Give an Administrator the Ability to Open and View the Contents of a User's Mailbox

Applies to: Office 365 for enterprises, Live@edu

Topic Last Modified: 2012-12-07

Your organization may require that Exchange Online administrators be able to open another user's mailbox and view the contents, including reading e-mail messages.

By default, Exchange Online administrators or members of the Organization Management administrator role group can access a user's Options page in the Exchange Control Panel, but they can’t open the user’s mailbox to view the contents. You have to explicitly grant to an administrator the required permissions to open another user's mailbox.

Assign permissions to one Exchange Online administrator

Run the following command:

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Add-MailboxPermission <user's mailbox> -User admin -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

Note You can also allow an ordinary user, such as an administrative assistant or human resources specialist, to open another user's mailbox by specifying that person in the User parameter.

Assign permissions to the Organization Management role group

Run the following command:

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Add-MailboxPermission <user's mailbox> -User "Organization Management" -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

Give full access to all user mailboxes in your organization

To allow access to all user mailboxes in your organization to the Exchange Online administrator, run the following command:

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Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'UserMailbox') -and (Alias -ne 'Admin')} | Add-MailboxPermission -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess -InheritanceType all -AutoMapping $False

To allow access to all user mailboxes to the members of the Organization Management role group, set the User parameter to “Organization Management” in the previous command.

Open another user's mailbox

Here's how you can open another user's mailbox after you've been granted permissions: Open Another Mailbox.