Docs / Obsidian Mail Server / People

Users, mailboxes and groups

Everything that has an email address on the server is listed under Users & groups. Exchange calls these recipients; there are six kinds.

Kind	What it is	Signs in?
User	A person's own mailbox, with mail, calendar and contacts	Yes
Shared mailbox	A mailbox for an address like `info@` or `support@` that several people open	No, people open it with their own sign-in
Room	A meeting room. Its calendar accepts bookings automatically when the room is free	No
Equipment	Something bookable, like a projector or a car. Works like a room	No
Group	An address that forwards to all its members, like `team@`	No
Contact	Someone outside the organization, shown in everyone's address book	No

Add a user

Open Users & groups and choose Add a user, or use Add a user on the home page.
Type the first and last name. The display name and email address fill in by themselves (for example [email protected]); change them if you prefer another pattern.
Keep the suggested password or type your own (at least 8 characters).
Choose Create. The next screen shows the address, password and sign-in address, with a Copy button, so you can hand them over.

The person can sign in straight away at https://mail.example.com/mail, add the account to their phone (see Connecting apps), and change their password in webmail under Settings.

Shared mailboxes

For addresses that belong to a role rather than a person (info@, sales@, accounts@):

Choose Add, then Shared mailbox, and give it a name. No password: nobody signs in to it directly.
On its page, under Who else can use this mailbox, add the people who should work in it. See Shared access.

Shared mailboxes show up in webmail's sidebar for everyone with access, and on phones and Macs that support it.

Rooms and equipment

Room and equipment mailboxes have a calendar that runs itself: when someone invites the room to a meeting, it accepts if it is free at that time and declines if it is already booked. People find rooms in the address book when they create a meeting. Nobody needs to open the room's mailbox.

Groups

A group gives several people one address. Mail to [email protected] goes to every member.

Add members on the group's page under Members. Members can be users, shared mailboxes, contacts or other groups.
Tick Also use for permissions when creating it (a security group in Exchange terms) to be able to grant a whole group access to a shared mailbox in one go.

Contacts

A contact is an outside address (a supplier, a partner) that should appear in everyone's address book. It has no mailbox here; mail to it goes to the outside address.

Extra email addresses

A mailbox can have several addresses; mail to any of them arrives in the same mailbox. On the person's page under Email addresses:

Add another address, for example a nickname or an address in a second domain of the organization.
Make primary chooses the address people see when this mailbox sends. The old primary stays as an extra address.

An address can only belong to one recipient.

Mailbox size limits

By default mailboxes have no limit. On a mailbox's page under Mailbox size, set up to three limits (for example 9 GB, 10 GB, 11 GB):

Warn at: the owner gets a warning email, once a day, while the mailbox is over this size.
Stop sending at: the owner can no longer send until they clean up.
Stop sending and receiving at: new mail to the mailbox is refused, and senders get a "mailbox full" notice.

Leave a limit empty for no limit.

Online archive

An online archive is a second mailbox for older mail, as in Exchange. It has its own size limit, so the main mailbox stays small and quick on phones, while old mail stays searchable in webmail.

Switch it on on the person's page under Online archive (user and shared mailboxes).
Automatic archiving: choose After 1 year (or 2, 3, 5 years) and mail older than that moves from every mail folder into the same folder in the archive (Inbox, Sent Items, Projects ...), once an hour. Drafts, Junk Email and Deleted Items are left alone.
By hand: in webmail, select messages and choose To archive (or the archive button while reading). In the archive, the same button moves mail back.
Size: Warn at and Full at work like the mailbox's own limits; the default is no limit.
Switch it off only once it is empty: move its mail back first.

The archive shows in webmail under Mailboxes > Online archive. Phones, Mac Mail and IMAP apps show the main mailbox only.

Hide from the address book

Tick Hide from the address book for mailboxes that should keep working but not appear when people search the address book, for example a service account or a departed employee's mailbox kept for reference.

Reset a password

Open the person's page and choose Reset password (or use Reset a password on the home page). Keep the suggested password or type one, and hand it over. The person is signed out of webmail everywhere; phones and apps ask for the new password at their next sync.

Helpdesk administrators can reset passwords too, without being able to change anything else.

Recover deleted mail

Deleting a message moves it to Deleted Items. Emptying Deleted Items, or deleting from it, keeps the message for another 14 days before it is gone for good:

The person themselves: in webmail, open Deleted Items and choose Recover deleted items. Tick the messages and choose Restore; each goes back to the folder it was deleted from.
An organization administrator: on the person's page under Users & groups, Deleted mail > Show deleted mail, tick and Restore selected. This lists the subjects of someone else's mail, so it is limited to organization and global administrators and recorded in the change history.

Disable or remove

Disable stops the account from signing in and removes it from the address book and from group mail, but keeps everything, and mail sent straight to its address still arrives. Enable it again at any time. Use this when someone leaves; give a colleague access through Shared access to keep an eye on incoming mail.
Remove deletes the recipient and all of its mail, calendar and contacts, permanently. There is no undo. Consider disabling, or converting access to a colleague through Shared access, instead.

Doing it from the command line

Everything on this page can be scripted with the oms command on the server, for example to create many mailboxes at once. See the Command-line reference.