What is Mail Contact in Office 365: A Detailed Explanation

If you want to connect people outside the organization you may need mail contact. Since it is easy to collaborate easily with Office 365, connecting with people outside your organization cannot be easy. Therefore, mail contacts come into the story and bridge this gap. Additionally, it helps transform communication from outside of the company easily so that the use of mail contacts increases.

Let’s start the topic by introducing the mail contact 

What is Mail Contact in Office 365?

Mail contacts represent external email addresses that are stored in your organization’s address book. These contacts are not users of any organization, but their email addresses are easily accessible to users of your organization.

For instance, if you regularly communicate with an external vendor or client, you can add them as a mail contact. This allows your users to send direct emails without having to manually enter their email address. However, mail contacts do not have their mailboxes, and are used only for receiving email. This feature helps you streamline your external communications and ensures that all important external email addresses are readily available to your users. In addition, In Office 365 it is quite easy to stay connected with colleagues. But what about communicating with people outside the organization? That’s where mail contacts are used. 

Why to Use Mail Contacts?

Mail contacts play an essential role in the organization’s communication. And used for the following reasons.

1. Used for External Communication – Mail contacts allow users to communicate with people outside your organization. You can easily send emails to recipients without the need to set up full user accounts by using it.
2. Maintaining Address Book Organization – It is essential for efficient communication to maintain the address book. With the mail contacts, you can keep external contacts separate from internal ones.
3. Searching for a contact – You can easily search contacts by using mail contact but you need to use distinct words for quite easy search.
4. Provides a unified view of both internal users and mail contacts.
5. Calendar Invitations – You can invite your mail contacts to meetings by adding them to calendar invitations.
6. Scheduling – It is quite compulsory for both the external person and the internal person to present at the scheduled meeting.

These are the reasons for using the mail contact hope you get some idea of the query  what is mail contact in Office 365

Creating Mail Contacts in Office 365

Creating the mail contact in Office 365 is an easy process if you follow the steps thoroughly. However, for creating mail contact there are three different methods mentioned below. You can choose any of them according to the requirements of your Organization.

Method # Using the Exchange Admin Center

Step 1. First, You need to Open the Exchange admin center 
Step 2. Navigate to Recipients and open Contacts.
Step 3. Click on the “Add +” a mail contact 
Step 4. Configure the settings in paneBasic information like First name, Last name, Initials Display name, Alias, Email, and mail contact information.
Step 5. Review the details.
Step 6. Click on the “Create” when you’re done.

Method # Using PowerShell

To create a mail contact using PowerShell, you need to follow the steps given below.

Step 1. Open the PowerShell and run it as the administrator 
Step 2. Connect to Exchange Online by using this command.

 Connect-ExchangeOnline

Step 3. Let’s create a new mail contact.
Step 4.  You’ll need to specify the contact’s name, external email address, and other optional blanks.

New-MailContact -Name "Jenifer"-ExternalEmailAddress "jeni@xyg.com"

Step 5. You can additionally add a parameter to it.

Moving to the last method i.e. creating mail contacts in Office 365 using Outlook on the web is as follows.

Method # Using Outlook on Web

Step 1. Open your web browser and navigate to Outlook on the local web.
Step 2. Sign in with your credential IDs
Step 3.  Access the People (Contacts) section.
Step 4.  Click on the “People” icon to go to the contact section 
Step 5. Then, select the “New” button from the menu.
Step 6. Go to the “Save” button and click on it to create the contact.

How to Modify the Mail Contacts?

If you want to Modify the Mail in Office 365 Contacts you need to follow the following steps 

Step 1. From the Exchange Admin Center(EAC) go to Recipients and then select Contacts.
Step 2. Now Select the mail contact to modify.
Step 3. In the mail contact details, view or edit the user’s contact details.
Step 4. Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.
Step 5. Use the appropriate cmdlets to create or modify mail contacts.

Edit the Mail Contact in Bulk

You can make use of the EAC for multiple mail contacts to change selected items. In the Details pane,  the properties that can be bulk edited are displayed when you select two or more mail contacts from the contacts list. If you change one property, the change is applied to all selected recipients.

If you want to edit bulk mail contacts, change these property 

• Contact Information 
•  The  Organization 

Make Use of the EAC to Bulk Edit Mail Contacts

To use the EAC to bulk edit the mail contact you need to follow the following steps.

Step 1. From the EAC, navigate to the Recipients and then Contacts.
Step 2. Select two or more mail contacts from the list 
Step 3. You are not able to edit a combination of mail contacts & mail users.
Step 4. Click on the Update under Contact Information or Organization.
Step 5. Make changes and then save changes.

Note: You can select multiple mail contacts by pressing down the Shift key, clicking the first mail contact, and then clicking the last mail contact you want to edit.

Scenario

Your organization has been acquired by a larger company, and both companies need to combine their contact lists to ensure smooth communication and productivity.

If you want to Export contact without any contact loss, the best way is to make use of the automated tool. One of the professional software present in the market is Office 365 Export Software. By using this, you can easily export your contacts, email, and calendar, from source to destination account. Saves your time and you can import your data in different file formats.

Key features of the tool are as follows,

• This tool supports various O365 subscription plans.
• Extracts Data from Office 365 into PST / EML / MSG / MBOX / PDF File Type.
• Compatible with the recent Microsoft Windows OS versions.

Bringing it all Together

With this context, I hope you get a picture clear idea of what is mail contact in Office 365. Mail contact is used like a virtual address book designed for external email addresses and organizations. Using this you can increase the productivity of the organization. In this context, you can also find out why to use mail contacts and how to create them according to the requirements of the user.

Commonly Asked Questions

Que: What is the difference between mail contacts and mail users?
Ans: Mail contacts do not have access to organization mailboxes, whereas mail users do. Additionally, mail contacts represent external email addresses only.

Que: Can mail contacts be added to the group?
Ans: Yes, you can add mail contacts to distribution groups or mail-enabled security groups, so that they can receive emails with the group.

Que: How to manage mail contacts?
Ans: You can view, edit, and delete mail contacts by logging in to the Admin Center. Additional settings are available in the “Contacts” tab in the “Recipients” section.