Exchange 2010: How to Grant Send As Permissions for a Distribution Group

In this article I’ll show you how to grand send as permissions for distribution groups in Exchange 2010. If you’re not sure what the difference is between “send as” and “send on behalf” it is as simple as this:

• “Send on behalf” is when the email message has a From address of “Person A on behalf of Person B”. This is fairly common with executives and their assistants who send things like meeting invitations on the exec’s behalf.
• “Send as” is when the message has a From address of Person B with no indication that it was actually sent by Person A. In other words this is more like impersonation, whereas “send on behalf” is more like delegation.

So let’s take a look at this scenario. Here we have Alannah Shaw, a member of the Payroll department, sending an email to Alan Reid and attempting to send as “Payroll Team”, which is a distribution group.

The email is not delivered because Alannah does not have permissions to send as the Payroll Team group.

Fortunately configuring “send as” permissions is not difficult at all. There are two ways to grant the permissions.

• Grant send as permissions to a mailbox user (eg, grant Alannah Shaw permission to send as “Payroll Team”)
• Grand send as permissions to a universal security group (eg grant “Payroll Team Leaders” permission to send as “Payroll Team”)

You can grant the permissions by using Active Directory Users & Computers. Simply open the properties of the group, switch to the Security tab, add the mailbox user or group, and then tick the Send As box and apply the change.

After making this change you may notice that it does not take effect for up to 2 hours. This is due to caching on the Exchange servers. Though you can speed up the change by restarting the Information Store that is obviously not going to be practical in most production environments, so you’ll often find that you just need to wait.

Once the change has taken effect the user can send as the distribution group.