Changed By field not displaying individual user's name in O365 Shared Mailbox

[cbrom]

Hi,
We have recently migrated a large team from using on premise mail-enabled Public Folders to using an Office 365 Shared Mailbox for incoming mail from the public.
The team relies heavily on the use of the "Changed By" field in Outlook to indicate which member of the team last dealt with an email, however, since the change to the Office 365 Shared Mailbox the "Changed By" field now only displays the name of the mailbox and not the name of the individual who is dealing with an email. This is obviously causing a lot of problems as the team is no longer able to identify who is dealing with an email in the Shared Mailbox.
Has anyone had the same problem and found a solution (i.e. to get the "Changed By" field to display the name of the individual who last changed the email?
Thanks
Colin

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Office 365 Shared Mailbox the "Changed By" field now only displays the name of the mailbox and not the name of the individual who is dealing with an email.

What change are they making? what permissions do the users have to the mailbox?

(Its working here when i flag or categorize a message in a shared mailbox added to my profile via auto mapping.)

 

[cbrom]

Users have a user-defined field (a checkbox called "In Progress" which they click to indicate they are working on the email). However, I have also tested setting a flag and categorizing a message and it doesn't work for me ("Changed By" field shows the name of the mailbox still).
We do have a different way of allocating permissions - we assign full access permissions using a mail-enabled O365 security group. We don’t use automapping as that involves adding users individually to the mailbox (however, we can give this a test to see if it makes a difference).
Thanks for your help.
Colin

 

[cbrom]

Users have a user-defined field (a checkbox called "In Progress" which they click to indicate they are working on the email). However, I have also tested setting a flag and categorizing a message and it doesn't work for me ("Changed By" field shows the name of the mailbox still).
We do have a different way of allocating permissions - we assign full access permissions using a mail-enabled O365 security group. We don’t use automapping as that involves adding users individually to the mailbox (however, we can give this a test to see if it makes a difference).
Thanks for your help.
Colin

I have tested on a separate shared mailbox with myself as the owner and if I change e.g. the category of an email the "Changed By" field shows the name of the mailbox rather than my name. We have raised the issue with Microsoft who say that this is intended behaviour - the field which is being modified being PR_LAST_MODIFIER_NAME. They also stated that the field holding the information we are trying to display is PR_SENT_REPRESENTING_NAME, however, I don't think this is correct as I have run some VBA code to extract these values (based on code on your website - thanks) and PR_SENT_REPRESENTING_NAME (as it implies from the name) returns the name of the person sending the email.
I assume that, in your case, PR_LAST_MODIFIER_NAME contains your name when you modify an email so it is puzzling to understand why we are getting this different behaviour.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I can understand why setting custom field might not change the changed by value (logically, any save should change the Changed by field, but I haven't tested it and Outlook sometimes does things that are not logical ) but setting a category or flag should change it.

This is from an automapped mailbox shared with me. The sender display name is shown (PR_SENT_REPRESENTING_NAME) as the last modifier until i do something, then my address is shown. In this example, I flagged it for follow-up.

in looking at it using MFCMAPI the sender is the last modifier until the message is modified.

 

[cbrom]

I get the same behaviour as you in that the sender display name is shown as the last modifier until I make a change, but them PR_LAST_MODIFIER_NAME shows as the mailbox display name rather than my own email display name. So the question is what is the difference between your setup and ours and why do Microsoft state that displaying the shared mailbox name is the intended behaviour? (I struggle to see any logic in that - there is not much value in knowing that the last change was made by somebody with access to the shared mailbox )

 

[Diane Poremsky]

How is the account added to your profile? If it is added as a shared mailbox (automapped or via secondary mailbox list in account settings), you should see your name. if it's added as a second account, you'll see the account name. I haven't tested all of the permissions, but its possible the lower level permissions would affect it too. (I have owner permission on the mailbox in my screenshot).

 

[cbrom]

How is the account added to your profile? If it is added as a shared mailbox (automapped or via secondary mailbox list in account settings), you should see your name. if it's added as a second account, you'll see the account name. I haven't tested all of the permissions, but its possible the lower level permissions would affect it too. (I have owner permission on the mailbox in my screenshot).

Sorry for the delay in replying. If I understand you correctly then we are adding the shared mailbox via secondary mailbox list in account settings - we don't use automapping because we are applying full mailbox permissions using an O365 mail-enabled security group. Users are added to the group and then add the shared mailbox themselves from Outlook (Account Settings > Change > More Settings > Advanced > Add).

We are in communication with Microsoft Support and they carried out the following tests which resulted in the same results as we get but not the same as yours (unfortunately)
1. Gave 3 different users “Send on behalf of” permissions on the mailbox via Exchange Management Console
2. The Automapping was enabled for the mailbox and the mailbox Automapped to user’s profiles
3. Sent an email from an external account to the shared mailbox
4. Open the email sent to the shared mailbox from User 1 and replied to it.
5. Checked the “Changed by” field from User 2 and User 3 account and saw that the field contained the name of the shared mailbox and not the name of the User 1 who replied to the email.

Can I just check what version of Outlook you were testing on? Ours is 16.0.8431.2110 32-bit

Thanks again for your help.
Colin

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I just updated 15 min ago to 9227.2013 - but what ever build i used then, it was an insider build. It would have been a couple of builds ahead of yours. i don't think the build is the issue - its always worked for me. Its how it is supposed to work.

Gave 3 different users “Send on behalf of” permissions on the mailbox via Exchange Management Console

did you try it with send as permission? It shouldn't matter, neither should how the account is added, but at this point anything and everything is worth looking at.

Are you caching the shared folders? I am. This is another 'it shouldn't matter' but is worth testing. I know sometimes the cache gets messed up and shared folders stop syncing... but if this change stopped syncing, i would expect everything to stop syncing in the folder.

 

[cbrom]

I just updated 15 min ago to 9227.2013 - but what ever build i used then, it was an insider build. It would have been a couple of builds ahead of yours. i don't think the build is the issue - its always worked for me. Its how it is supposed to work.


did you try it with send as permission? It shouldn't matter, neither should how the account is added, but at this point anything and everything is worth looking at.

Are you caching the shared folders? I am. This is another 'it shouldn't matter' but is worth testing. I know sometimes the cache gets messed up and shared folders stop syncing... but if this change stopped syncing, i would expect everything to stop syncing in the folder.

It turns out that it is a problem with syncing. After testing with Microsoft support they established that there is a bug in Exchange which prevents the contents of the Changed By field syncing with the server. You were correct in sensing that the difference we were seeing was to do with caching the shared folders - we had it turned off and were seeing the value of the Changed By field on the server as the shared mailbox name, whereas with caching enabled we were seeing (as you did) the email address of the person making the change. Unfortunately, however, this value (although it is sent back to the server) never updates on the server which means that, in the shared mailbox, the value of the Changed By field as viewed by one user can be different from the value seen by another user. MS say that it is complex to fix so I don't think it will be fixed soon :-(

As an alternative approach MS have suggested using Categories to identify the user dealing with the email and using this, together with the Quick Steps feature, to set the Category with a single click, would seem to offer a reasonable alternative for what we need to do.
Another option I was wondering about was maybe to set the value of a user-defined text field (or perhaps the Category field) from the Changed By field at the point it changed, using VBA? Presumably the value of the user-defined field would sync successfully? Any thoughts on this?

Thanks again for your help.