How to share a Gmail inbox with your team

1. Gmail delegation: free, and fine for two people

Google lets you grant another account delegate access to your mailbox. The delegate reads, sends and archives on your behalf, and replies go out marked as sent by them on your behalf.

It is genuinely the simplest option and it costs nothing. It also has no concept of ownership: two delegates in the same mailbox see the same unread mail with no way to say "I have this one", so the coordination happens in your heads, or in Slack.

• Good for: one shared address, one or two people, low volume.
• Stops working when: two people answer the same email, or you cannot tell what has been handled.

2. A Google Group: free, but everyone gets everything

Point support@ at a Google Group and every member receives every message in their own inbox. Nothing is shared: each person has their own copy, their own read state and their own idea of what is done.

For an alias that mostly forwards to one person, this is fine. For a queue two or more people work, it multiplies the problem rather than solving it.

3. A Collaborative Inbox: free, and the best free option

Google Groups has a Collaborative Inbox mode that adds the missing verbs: assign a conversation to a member, mark it complete, duplicate or needing no action, and filter to what is still unresolved. If you only need who-has-this and is-it-done, use it. It costs nothing and it is already in your Workspace.

What it does not have is the part teams actually reach for next: there is no way to leave an internal note on a conversation, no shared draft, and no rules. Assignment and resolution are also gated by group moderation permissions, so not everyone can use every function.

• Good for: low volume, small teams, simple triage.
• Stops working when: you need to discuss an email without replying to the customer.

4. A shared-inbox tool: paid, and the point of the category

Tools in this category add the collaboration layer: internal comments and @mentions attached to the conversation, one clear owner, drafts your teammates can see but not overwrite, and rules that route mail automatically.

They split into two shapes, and the difference matters more than any feature list. Some replace your mail client and ingest your mail into their own store. Others sit on top of Gmail over Google's API and leave Gmail as the system of record, so your mail never moves and cancelling means disconnecting rather than migrating.

How to choose

Count the people who answer the address, and ask whether they need to talk about an email before replying. One or two people who never discuss? Delegation. A handful who need assignment but not discussion? Collaborative Inbox. The moment "let me forward this to you" becomes a habit, that is the signal to buy something. The tool is replacing a coordination cost you are already paying in interruptions.

When you do shortlist, ask each vendor one question: if we leave, where is our mail? The answers differ enormously, and it is the hardest thing to change later.