Gmail shared inbox: what Google Workspace gives you free, and where it breaks

Shared credentials: ruled out, not recommended

The first thing most teams try is the simplest: one email address, one password, everyone signs in. It's worth naming only to rule it out. A shared login means a shared password that has to be manually rotated whenever someone leaves the team, no per-person audit trail of who actually sent a given reply, and two-factor authentication and account-recovery flows that assume a single owner, not a team. It also runs against Google Workspace's own terms, which are built around one person per account. Neither of the two approaches below carries that risk, so there's no real reason to reach for shared credentials even as a stopgap.

Gmail delegation

Delegation stays closest to a normal Gmail inbox: one person grants a handful of others access to read, send, and delete on their behalf, without sharing a password. Delegates see the inbox as an extra account inside their own Gmail, and can reply as the delegated address.

• It's still one person's inbox, not a team's: there's no separate owner field per message, no team-wide labeling scheme built in, and no way to mark a message as somebody else's without a manual convention.
• Google caps how many people can be granted delegate access on a single account, which rules delegation out once more than a few people need in.
• Everything delegates do happens inside the original owner's mailbox, so if that person leaves, access and continuity have to be manually rebuilt around whoever inherits it.

1. 1

   In Gmail, open Settings (the gear icon), then See all settings.

2. 2

   Go to the Accounts tab and find Grant access to your account.

3. 3

   Select Add another account, enter the delegate's email address, and send the request.

4. 4

   The delegate accepts the invitation from their own Gmail; once accepted, the inbox appears as an additional account they can switch into.

Google Groups Collaborative Inbox

A Google Group configured as a Collaborative Inbox is the option built to look like a shared inbox: messages sent to the group's address land in one shared view, and members can mark each conversation's status, for example no action needed, in progress, or duplicate, and assign it to a specific member.

1. 1

   Go to groups.google.com and create a new group, using the group's email address as the shared address people will write to.

2. 2

   Under the group's access settings, set who can view topics, post, and join, matching that to who on the team should see and reply to incoming mail.

3. 3

   In the group's settings, turn on the Collaborative Inbox view so members see statuses and assignment options on each conversation instead of a plain mailing-list view.

4. 4

   Add the team as members, and confirm each person's posting permission so they can reply from the group context.

Where all three break as the team grows

Even the best of the three, the Collaborative Inbox, is built on top of a mailing list, not a purpose-built support tool, and it shows once a team or its volume grows past a small handful of people:

• Crude assignment: a conversation can be assigned to one member, but there's no workload view, no queue, and no way to see who's overloaded versus idle.
• No collision detection: nothing stops two members from replying to the same topic at the same time, the status field is a convention, not an enforced lock.
• Thread splitting: replies sent directly to a member rather than the group address fall outside the shared view entirely, so the record silently loses messages.
• No ownership history: there's no report of who handled what over time, so measuring response times or spotting a dropped thread means reading the group by hand.

A decision framework by team size and volume

Which free option fits depends less on preference than on two numbers: how many people need access, and how much of that mail turns into real, trackable work.

When you've outgrown Gmail's free options

The moment a message stops being a quick reply and starts being a piece of work someone owns, especially work that needs to reach engineering, a Collaborative Inbox's per-topic status label stops being enough. That's the point to look at a real shared inbox for engineering teams, with actual assignment, collision detection, and a one-keystroke path to turn a message into a linked Linear issue, instead of a Google Group doing its best impression of one.