Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Shared Mailbox in Google Workspace

If your team manages requests and queries from either internal or external stakeholders, using a shared email address is a good idea.

You can create a support@ ID that all your support team members can access. You can do the same if you’re working in finance or HR. 

But the challenge begins when multiple people start accessing the same set of emails. 

You start missing messages, two people might end up responding to the same email, and it also becomes difficult to tell who’s responsible for what email. This is where a shared mailbox becomes useful.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how shared mailboxes work in Google Workspace and show you how to set one up for your team.

Table of Contents

• What is Google Workspace Shared Mailbox?
• What Is the Difference Between Delegated Access and Collaborative Inbox?
• What Teams Can Do with a Google Workspace Shared Mailbox
  • Delegated Gmail Access
  • Google Collaborative Inbox
• How to Create a Google Workspace Shared Mailbox
  • 1. How to set up delegated access in Gmail
  • 2. How to set up a collaborative inbox in Google Groups
• When a Google Workspace Shared Mailbox Isn’t Enough
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is Google Workspace Shared Mailbox?

A Google Workspace shared mailbox is a team email address (like support@yourcompany.com or info@yourcompany.com) that multiple people manage together.

Google Workspace doesn’t offer a traditional shared mailbox feature. Instead, teams typically use delegated Gmail access or Google Collaborative Inbox to manage a shared email address.

What Is the Difference Between Delegated Access and Collaborative Inbox?

Google Workspace offers two ways to manage a shared mailbox: delegated Gmail access and a Collaborative Inbox through Google Groups. Both allow multiple people to handle incoming emails, but they work differently and support different levels of coordination.

What Teams Can Do with a Google Workspace Shared Mailbox

A Google Workspace shared mailbox keeps all internal communications in one place. However, the capabilities differ depending on which setup you use.

Delegated Gmail Access

Here’s what your team can do with delegated access:

• Access the mailbox from their own Gmail accounts: Delegates can open and manage the mailbox without logging into a shared account.
• Read and reply from the shared email address: You can respond to emails as the team email (such as support@ or info@), keeping communication consistent for customers and partners.
• Manage messages together: Archive, delete, or label emails inside the mailbox just like a normal Gmail inbox.
• Work inside the familiar Gmail interface: Because everything happens inside Gmail, team members don’t need to learn a new system.

Delegated access works best when one or two people need to monitor or manage a shared mailbox.

Google Collaborative Inbox

Your team can use Google Workspace Collaborative Inbox to:

• Assign conversations to team members: Define ownership for each email so everyone knows who is responsible for responding.
• Track conversation status: Messages can be marked as complete, duplicate, or no action needed to keep the inbox organized.
• Organize conversations with labels: You can use labels to group conversations by priority, department, or request type.
• Maintain shared visibility across the team: Members can see assignments and conversation progress, making it easier to coordinate responses.

A Collaborative Inbox provides more structure to email management than delegated access, but still lacks deeper collaboration, automation, and reporting features.

How to Create a Google Workspace Shared Mailbox

Like we mentioned earlier, Google Workspace offers two ways to share a mailbox with your team: delegated access and Google Collaborative Inbox.

1. How to set up delegated access in Gmail

Delegated access is the simpler option. It allows one or two trusted users to manage a mailbox through Gmail, but it does not include collaboration tools like assignments or status tracking.

• In Gmail (desktop version), go to Settings → Accounts and Imports or Accounts → Grant access to your account.

• Click ‘Add another account,’ enter their Gmail address, and send the invite.
• From there, it will take 5-10 minutes to activate once the delegate accepts an invite.

Delegated access in Google Workspace is useful when a single mailbox needs to be monitored or managed by one or two trusted individuals, and not a full-fledged team.

It works well for scenarios like:

– An executive assistant managing a manager’s mailbox

– A finance lead monitoring a billing@company.com address

– Someone is temporarily covering another teammate’s email

However, it does have some limitations: you can’t assign messages to specific teammates or track who’s replied (or how long it took). Everyone shares the same blanket permissions, creating security blind spots. There’s no way to tag colleagues, flag threads as “in progress,” or escalate urgent requests.

For teams that need more coordination, Google Workspace also offers a Collaborative Inbox through Google Groups.

2. How to set up a collaborative inbox in Google Groups

A Google workspace collaborative inbox is a feature of Google Groups that allows you to manage shared email IDs like info@ and support@ from a common workspace. Multiple team members can access and respond to emails that arrive in this mailbox. Unlike regular Gmail or delegated accounts, it enables better collaboration with features such as conversation assignment, tagging, and status tracking.  

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how you can set up Google Collaborative Inbox.

Step 1: Access Google Groups:

Sign in to your Google Workspace account and visit Google Groups – a platform for creating and managing a collaborative inbox.

Step 2: Create a new group

Click on “Create Group.” Enter the group name, email (like support@yourdomain.com), and description. Remember to choose a descriptive name to reflect the purpose of the shared mailbox.

Step 3: Set permissions

Under privacy settings, you can control who can join the group, view conversations, post messages, and moderate messages.  

Step 4: Add members:

Add members to the group and give them the appropriate roles (e.g., manager or member). 

💡Keep in mind:

– Owners have complete control over the group — they can manage settings, roles, conversations, and perform all administrative actions.

– Managers handle daily workflows, such as assigning conversations, updating statuses, moderating posts, and keeping discussions on track.

– Members can view, reply to, and participate in conversations, but they usually don’t have permission to assign tasks or change statuses.

Step 5: Enable Google Collaborative Inbox:

Once you’ve added your team, you can enable the Collaborative Inbox option. Click the name of a group. On the left, click Group Settings. Under ‘Enable additional Google Groups features,’ select ‘Collaborative Inbox.’

Step 6: Assign emails to yourself or others in the group:

Emails sent to the group address appear in the Collaborative Inbox, where members can assign and manage them. From there, you can define ownership by assigning it to yourself or any member of the group. 

Step 7: Edit and update status:

Once the email is assigned, you and your team can update its status. Choose between ‘mark as complete,’ ‘mark as duplicate,’ or ‘no action needed.’

Now, members of your group can access, assign, and respond to emails collectively. This is a good step toward centralizing communication, but it comes with trade-offs. Though the setup is straightforward, Google Collaborative Inbox has some limitations. 

• There’s no way to track who’s working on what. You don’t have a separate team view where you can apply filters and see specific emails by owners or status.

• If you reply to a customer email using your personal ID, you’ll always need to CC the group email, or it won’t appear in the group mailbox. And if you want to discuss something with a teammate, you have to forward or CC the email, which clutters everyone’s mailbox.
• There’s no built-in dashboard to track metrics like response times, volume trends, SLA compliance, or individual performance.
• You can’t create automated workflow rules or trigger notifications based on conditions like keywords in the email or sender.

When a Google Workspace Shared Mailbox Isn’t Enough

Both delegated Gmail access and Google Workspace Collaborative Inbox help teams manage shared email addresses. However, as teams grow and email volume increases, these setups start to show limitations.

• Limited visibility into team performance: Google Workspace doesn’t provide built-in reporting for shared mailboxes. Teams can’t easily track response times, resolution speed, backlog trends, or workload distribution.
• Collaboration gaps: Delegated access offers almost no coordination features, while Collaborative Inbox provides only basic assignment and status updates. There are no internal notes, @mentions, or shared drafts for team discussions.
• Manual workflows: Email routing, prioritization, and assignments rely on people manually organizing messages. There’s no automation to route emails based on sender, keywords, or request type.
• Lack of operational oversight: Managers have limited visibility into how work moves through the inbox. It’s difficult to monitor workload balance, response quality, or SLA performance.

As teams scale, these limitations make shared email management harder to organize and track.

This is where tools like Hiver come in. Hiver works directly inside Gmail, adding the missing layer of clarity and coordination to your existing email workflow. Instead of switching to a new system, your team can continue working from the Gmail interface they already know—while gaining the visibility, accountability, and collaboration features that Google Workspace lacks.

Here are some of the collaboration features Hiver adds to Google Workspace

• Internal notes and @mentions to have quick discussions without forwarding or CC-ing emails. For example, a support agent can tag a teammate in an internal note like “@John can you confirm if this order was shipped?”—keeping the conversation private without cluttering the customer thread.
• Use email tags that automatically organize and prioritize incoming messages.
• You can rely on auto-assignment to route queries to the right team member without any manual intervention.  
• Shared drafts and email templates let you co-edit responses in real-time and ensure that your team sends out accurate, consistent replies.
• AI Copilot to help you craft responses to customer emails using your knowledge base as source content. It provides AI-suggested replies you can use instantly, and an “Ask AI” option to draft, refine, or rephrase responses with simple prompts. It also auto-closes “thank you” or non-actionable emails and suggests relevant email templates. 
• Use reports and analytics to keep track of metrics like response time, resolution time, and ticket volume.  

If your shared inbox is starting to feel messy, it’s usually a sign your team needs more structure, not more email threads. Try Hiver free for 7 days to bring accountability, and organized workflows to your team, regardless of which email provider you use.👉

Start your free trial now!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)