As an Exchange Online administrator, you are responsible for managing multiple mailboxes and ensuring that your organization’s email communication is smooth and efficient. One task you may encounter is adding or removing SMTP aliases for your organization’s mailboxes.
These aliases are additional email addresses that can be associated with a mailbox in Exchange Online, allowing users to receive emails sent to multiple addresses.
In this blog post, we will guide you through the steps required to add or remove SMTP aliases for Exchange Online mailboxes, making it easier for you to manage your organization’s email communication.
Whether you are new to Exchange Online administration or a seasoned expert, the information in this post will be useful in helping you maintain efficient email communication for your organization.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
You must have administrator access to an Exchange organization (Online or On-Premises) with at least a Recipient Management permission. This tutorial uses Exchange Online, but the procedure should be similar to Exchange On-premises (2016/2019).
Using the Exchange Admin Center to Add or Remove SMTP Alias to Exchange Mailbox
The Exchange Admin Center is the web-based management interface for all things Exchange. The interface, however, will be different between the On-premises Exchange and Exchange Online.
First, log in to the Exchange admin center.
- For Exchange On-premises, the URL would be — https:///ecp. Replace with your Exchange server’s FQDN or name.
- For Exchange Online, the URL would be — https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/ (New) or https://outlook.office365.com/ecp (Classic).
Classic Exchange Admin Center
Note. The Classic Exchange Admin Center in Exchange Online sports a similar experience to the On-premises Exchange Admin Center.
Navigate to recipients > mailboxes and double-click the mailbox you wish to modify.
Once the mailbox property is open, click email address on the left menu. To add an SMTP address, click the Add button (plus sign).
Select SMTP as the Email address type, enter the new Email address, and click OK.
Once the new SMTP alias is added, click Save to save the changes.
And click OK.
To remove an SMTP alias, open the mailbox properties again and navigate to email address. Select the SMTP alias to remove and click the Remove button (minus sign) and click Save.
Note. For On-premises Exchange mailboxes, you cannot remove an SMTP alias that was added by an email address policy. As a workaround, you can remove the email address policy from the mailbox first before removing the SMTP alias.
New Exchange Admin Center
Navigate to Recipients > Mailboxes and the mailbox to edit.
The mailbox properties fly-out shows up to the right. Click the General tab and the Manage email address types link.
To add an SMTP alias, click the Add email address type button.
Select SMTP as the Email address type, type the local part of the email address, choose the domain from the dropdown list, ad click OK.
Once the SMTP alias has been added, click Save.
And you should see a confirmation message like the one below.
To remove an SMTP alias, open the mailbox properties again and click the Manage email addresses type link. Once the list of email addresses is open, click the trash button next to the SMTP alias you want to delete and click Save.
Using Exchange PowerShell to Add or Remove SMTP Alias to Exchange Mailbox
Adding and removing SMTP aliases from Exchange mailboxes is also possible through PowerShell. But there are a few tricks you need to learn to make sure to avoid accidentally replacing all email aliases instead of just adding or removing specific entries.
First, open the Exchange Management Shell (On-premises) or connect Exchange Online PowerShell.
Using the Array Method
Let’s get all the email addresses in the mailbox. In this example, we’ll get the aliases for the user AlexW and store them in the $aliases variable.
$aliases = (Get-Mailbox AlexW).EmailAddresses $aliases
As you can see, the $aliases variable now holds the current email addresses of the mailbox.
Now, let’s add a new SMTP alias to the list.
$aliases+='smtp:alex_wilber@org870b.ga'
A few things to note about the above command.
- alex_wilber@org870b.ga is the new SMTP address to add to the mailbox. Make sure that the domain part is an accepted domain in your Exchange organization to avoid errors.
- The email address prefix is in lowercase (smtp:) to indicate that it is an SMTP alias only. Use the uppercase prefix (SMTP:) is reserved for the primary SMTP email address.
Finally, let’s apply the new email address list to the mailbox.
Set-Mailbox AlexW -EmailAddresses $aliases (Get-Mailbox AlexW).EmailAddresses
The result shows that the new SMTP alias has been added.
Using the same method, we can also remove the SMTP alias.
First, create an array and add all SMTP aliases to remove from the mailbox. In this example, I’m only removing one SMTP alias.
$aliasesToRemove = @('smtp:alex_wilber@org870b.ga')
Next, let’s get all the email addresses of the mailbox but filter out the aliases to remove.
$aliases = (Get-Mailbox AlexW).EmailAddresses | Where-Object { $_ -notin $aliasesToRemove }
$aliases
The result shows all email address aliases of the mailbox except the one we want to remove. This list is stored in the $aliases array.
Now, let’s apply the modified aliases list to the mailbox.
Set-Mailbox AlexW -EmailAddresses $aliases (Get-Mailbox AlexW).EmailAddresses
And the SMTP alias is now removed from the mailbox.
Using the Add and Remove Method
Without building a separate array like in the previous method, you can directly specify to the Set-Mailbox cmdlet the SMTP alias to add or remove using this syntax.
Set-Mailbox MAILBOX -EmailAddresses @{add='alias1','alias2';remove='alias3','alias4'}
For example, we will add the SMTP alias smtp:alex_wilber@org870b.ga to the AlexW mailbox.
Set-Mailbox AlexW -EmailAddresses @{add='smtp:alex_wilber@org870b.ga'}
(Get-Mailbox AlexW).EmailAddresses
To remove the SMTP alias, replace add with remove.
Set-Mailbox AlexW -EmailAddresses @{remove='smtp:alex_wilber@org870b.ga'}
(Get-Mailbox AlexW).EmailAddresses
And the SMTP alias is now removed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, adding or removing SMTP aliases to an Exchange mailbox can be a simple and straightforward process as long as you have the necessary permissions and follow the steps carefully.
By adding an SMTP alias, you can ensure that your mailbox is able to receive emails sent to multiple email addresses, which can be useful for managing different departments or projects. On the other hand, removing an SMTP alias can help you clean up your mailbox and reduce clutter.
Whether you are adding or removing an SMTP alias, it is important to remember that these changes can take some time to propagate, so be patient and give it some time. With these tips in mind, you should be able to add or remove SMTP aliases to your Exchange mailbox with ease.
