How can I set up a shared mailbox in Google Apps for Business?

Question

I'm trying to setup a functioning email system for the business so I have turned to Google. We have a few requirements:

We need to have one account accessed by <10 people, [email protected] but I cannot appear to find anything related to this. Currently I am using a 30 day trial and I have not setup the actual email boxes to be moved yet.

All I can find on the internet is something about delegation, but that does not show up on my accounts. (Is this because we have not yet migrated the email servers?)

Summary: We need multiple people to access one account, while accessing their own email. A shared inbox on Google Apps for Business.

Other notes. We have been using Outlook previously. Ideally we would like to move over to the online Google client but Outlook is still an option for our shared mailboxes.

Answer 1

Google Apps lets you set up a collaborative inbox for your [email protected] mailbox.

This is in fact a group, where you specify which people should be members of it. Then allow anyone to post messages to the group through the email address.

The group members gets a nice web UI (similar to a GMail inbox) where they can see incoming messages, assign messages to themselves or others, mark a message as Resolved or tag them. See the page I linked to above for more details.

Note that you may have to enable the Google Groups for Business feature in the Google Apps administration console, before being able to set up a collaborative inbox. See Setting up a Google Group with collaborative inbox for details.

Delegation is more for giving one person access to another's mailbox, like letting your co-worker handle your mail while you're on vacation.

Answer 2

You can achieve this using Hiver Shared Mailboxes. It lets you manage your shared mailboxes right from your Gmail (Google Apps)

You can setup the info@ account as the shared mailbox in Hiver and your team mates will be able to access the emails sent to info@ from their Gmail. You can assign the emails to your team as well as close them.

The shared mailbox users can reply from their personal email id or the shared mailbox id and Hiver would keep showing your the replies sent by anyone in your team.

Disclaimer: I am associated with Hiver but I think this is a relevant answer here.

Answer 3

Try setting up a group. All the people that need to have access are members of that group and the group has public access so anyone can send to it.

See https://support.google.com/a/answer/33329?hl=en

Answer 4

You can also use Deskun.

That's a Gmail extension that allows you to tie any email account to gmail and work with it together. It's good for organizing customer support or to manage tasks inside your company. All your support agents will be able to reply from the shared address.

Answer 5

I have researched this very same functionality extensively and I am convinced that it cannot be accomplished using vanilla Google Apps for Business offering. Not to the level required by the question poster.

Members of my organisation want to be able to essentially see a mailbox that looks exactly the same for everyone. If anyone adds or removes a folder everyone else will see that change. If any messages are moved between folders this change is reflected in everyone's client.

The closest I could find to what might fit the needs of my organisation is a third party solution offered by https://grexit.com/ however this has a very high cost associated with it. It's basically another 100% on top of Google's price, which becomes very expensive very quickly for a growing organisation.