imap - Access Office356 shared mailbox with PHP

Question

I'm working on a PHP script to read and parse error logs sent to a shared mailbox.

I'm using imap_open() to connect.

If I connect with the following credentials to my own mailbox, it works fine

server: {outlook.office365.com:993/imap/ssl}
username: myname@domain.com
password: mypas$word

However, if I want to connect to the sared mailbox with the follwowing credentials, I get an error

server: {outlook.office365.com:993/imap/ssl}
username: myname@domain.comshared-folder@domain.com
password: mypas$word

The error is the following: User is authenticated but not connected. (errflg=2)

According to my research that would mean I'm using the wrong password, but since it works when connecting to my own inbox, it can't be wrong

I am a 100% certain my account can access the shared mailbox, I can access it via my account through the Office 365 webinterface

One more detail: my password includes a $ sign, but that shouldn't matter. I use single quotes on the password and escaping the $ sign doesn't help, it results in a failed login even for my personal mailbox.

Answer 1

Another solution that worked for us is to add the username data to the mailbox parameter using the appropriate flags.

For example, with the Office 365 configuration of

USER EMAIL: user@maindomain.com
PASSWORD: password
SHARED MAILBOX: shared@anotherdomain.com

then the imap_open call would be

imap_open("{outlook.office365.com:993/imap/ssl/authuser=user@maindomain.com/user=shared@anotherdomain.com}", "user@maindomain.com", "password");

Note the inclusion of the main user email using the /authuser flag and the shared mailbox using the /user flag.

That worked for us when the mailbox alias approach in the previous answer was not successful.