How best to manage a shared email inbox with multiple people

[anonymous-user]

I have a small but irritating technical problem, and would be interested to know how others have solved it.

Let's say you have a team of people in a department who each have their own email address but also have responsibility for managing a shared inbox like sales@ or customerservice@ address.

You could just ask each person to login to both their own email inbox and the shared one. However, how do you know if someone else is already working on a particular email? You could forward the email from the shared mailbox to the individual's mailbox, and then archive the message. But that clutters up the email thread by adding an extra step and is a little cumbersome.

Additionally, because we use gmail as our mail server, google can get confused if you login into two email accounts at the same time as it doesn't always know for example which google drive account to use.

The current solution we are using is a gmail label sharing extension. We allocate one person to run through the shared inbox every hour or so and allocate a label to each email which needs attention. This then appears in the individual's inbox in one of their folders.

But many label sharing extensions are flaky with delayed syncing etc. So the one I have found works is packaged with a lot of other features we don't use, and so is getting expensive.

So I am wondering, is there an easier way people are handling their shared inboxes?

[Alex Z]

Best place to start would be bin Gmail for Office 365.

Anyway, when I’ve had to set this up for people in the past, we had the shared mailbox as a secondary in Outlook. In the shared mailbox we had subfolders for “In progress - Alex” and so on. In those would be subfolders for “Complete”

People would keep an eye on the inbox, then when something came in that they were going to handle they’d move the message to the In Progress folder, then on to Complete when done.

The manager can see at a glance what’s unallocated and who is busy.

I believe Gmail mailboxes used with Outlook will display labels as folders but seriously, bin Gmail.

Edited by Alex Z on Tuesday 28th August 21:52

[anonymous-user]

Alex Z said:

Best place to start would be bin Gmail for Office 365.

Anyway, when I’ve had to set this up for people in the past, we had the shared mailbox as a secondary in Outlook. In the shared mailbox we had subfolders for “In progress - Alex” and so on. In those would be subfolders for “Complete”

People would keep an eye on the inbox, then when something came in that they were going to handle they’d move the message to the In Progress folder, then on to Complete when done.

The manager can see at a glance what’s unallocated and who is busy.

I believe Gmail mailboxes used with Outlook will display labels as folders but seriously, bin Gmail.

Don't really want to bin gmail - I have had everything setup to use google gsuite. For example we use chromebooks quite a lot, I have several custom extensions that run on gmail, plus we use integration between gmail and salesforce.

So removing gmail and replacing the functionality with office 365 would be expensive. If that is the best option, annoyingly I will just have to keep paying for the label sharing solution.

[Harpoon]

How many users work on the shared inboxes? How much budget do you have?

I'd consider stopping using e-mail clients and use a web ticketing system. That collects e-mails from the inboxes and provides a shared system for replying to the messages.

Zendesk starts at £5 per agent (user) per month. I did a lot with DeskPro at my last job and that was £30/user/month. DeskPro was good to work with for teams. For instance if a user is replying to a ticket (email) in DeskPro and another agent opens that ticket, they will see what the other person is typing in near real-time. Both are hosted (though you can host DeskPro yourself if you wanted to), so no servers to setup or mess with.

https://www.zendesk.co.uk/support/
https://www.deskpro.com/

There's load more out there (Freshdesk, Zoho etc), including some open source options which are free eg http://osticket.com/features

Your e-mails would still route through Gmail, so nothing to change there.

[anonymous-user]

Harpoon said:

How many users work on the shared inboxes? How much budget do you have?

I'd consider stopping using e-mail clients and use a web ticketing system. That collects e-mails from the inboxes and provides a shared system for replying to the messages.

Zendesk starts at £5 per agent (user) per month. I did a lot with DeskPro at my last job and that was £30/user/month. DeskPro was good to work with for teams. For instance if a user is replying to a ticket (email) in DeskPro and another agent opens that ticket, they will see what the other person is typing in near real-time. Both are hosted (though you can host DeskPro yourself if you wanted to), so no servers to setup or mess with.

https://www.zendesk.co.uk/support/
https://www.deskpro.com/

There's load more out, include some open source options which are free eg http://osticket.com/features

Your e-mails would still route through Gmail, so nothing to change there.

Hmmm.... that's interesting. Not thought of that.

The label sharing cost is $35/user, which for label sharing I think is a lot, but the cost is mainly because it is linked to a lot of other features we don't need. We have 10 people sharing the one email address.

[Jakg]

Harpoon said:

How many users work on the shared inboxes? How much budget do you have?

I'd consider stopping using e-mail clients and use a web ticketing system. That collects e-mails from the inboxes and provides a shared system for replying to the messages.

Zendesk starts at £5 per agent (user) per month. I did a lot with DeskPro at my last job and that was £30/user/month. DeskPro was good to work with for teams. For instance if a user is replying to a ticket (email) in DeskPro and another agent opens that ticket, they will see what the other person is typing in near real-time. Both are hosted (though you can host DeskPro yourself if you wanted to), so no servers to setup or mess with.

https://www.zendesk.co.uk/support/
https://www.deskpro.com/

There's load more out there (Freshdesk, Zoho etc), including some open source options which are free eg http://osticket.com/features

Your e-mails would still route through Gmail, so nothing to change there.

As above, Zendesk would be my recommendation. It's certainly going to be more expensive than your current solution, but it's a much more rounded product - you can keep track of what's outstanding much more easily and more importantly you can be sure nothing's slipping through the cracks.

[4x4Tyke]

The simplest way would be for the duty person to forwarded the messages on a round robin basis, rather than adding a label.

If you gets lots of them, then set up forwarding rules on a gmail inbox, if monday forward to Alice, if tuesday forward to Bob, etc ... Just select some appropriate criteria.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en

[jonamv8]

Harpoon said:

How many users work on the shared inboxes? How much budget do you have?

I'd consider stopping using e-mail clients and use a web ticketing system. That collects e-mails from the inboxes and provides a shared system for replying to the messages.

Zendesk starts at £5 per agent (user) per month. I did a lot with DeskPro at my last job and that was £30/user/month. DeskPro was good to work with for teams. For instance if a user is replying to a ticket (email) in DeskPro and another agent opens that ticket, they will see what the other person is typing in near real-time. Both are hosted (though you can host DeskPro yourself if you wanted to), so no servers to setup or mess with.

https://www.zendesk.co.uk/support/
https://www.deskpro.com/

There's load more out there (Freshdesk, Zoho etc), including some open source options which are free eg http://osticket.com/features

Your e-mails would still route through Gmail, so nothing to change there.

Decent advice ^^^^

[buggalugs]

This is an area where G-Suite really need to up its game IMO. 365 has shared mailboxes, Groups, Teams etc. Google has jack. No wonder they’re in a very distant second place these days sadly, and I only see the gap growing as long as they offer less features for the same cost.

[anonymous-user]

buggalugs said:

This is an area where G-Suite really need to up its game IMO. 365 has shared mailboxes, Groups, Teams etc. Google has jack. No wonder they’re in a very distant second place these days sadly, and I only see the gap growing as long as they offer less features for the same cost.

Agree. When I first switched over to g-suite several years ago, office 365 wasn't anything like as established as it is now.

But in the ways you describe, it is now lagging behind.

[hsnrentals]

Use Office 365 and set up shared mailbox.
Then add everyone who needs to view it.

[anonymous-user]

hsnrentals said:

Use Office 365 and set up shared mailbox.
Then add everyone who needs to view it.

I can't do that unfortunately for the reasons mentioned earlier. (Well, I suppose I could do it, but the cost would be prohibitive).

[buggalugs]

EddieSteadyGo said:

buggalugs said:

This is an area where G-Suite really need to up its game IMO. 365 has shared mailboxes, Groups, Teams etc. Google has jack. No wonder they’re in a very distant second place these days sadly, and I only see the gap growing as long as they offer less features for the same cost.

Agree. When I first switched over to g-suite several years ago, office 365 wasn't anything like as established as it is now.

But in the ways you describe, it is now lagging behind.

Getting o/t but I like it and still use it myself, but it feels like Google has abandoned the product. They've done nothing with it for years where 365 has new features almost on a weekly basis, yet continue to ask the same for it as a basic 365 mailbox. Another thing is Google gives you a whopping 30GB of G drive vs 1TB for MS OneDrive at the same price. They're either asleep at the wheel or deliberately running it down.

[Bikerjon]

G-Suite doesn't really use the shared mailbox concept in the same way as Exchange/365, you can however setup a shared group as a collaborative inbox, which I think is the closest option.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/167430?hl=en

[Marcellus]

Not sure how G mail works but couldn;t all the team have access to the inbox and if they're working on it move the email into their own folder so it "disappears" from the shared folder?

[anonymous-user]

Marcellus said:

Not sure how G mail works but couldn;t all the team have access to the inbox and if they're working on it move the email into their own folder so it "disappears" from the shared folder?

In theory yes, but it becomes a pain. Google wants people to "log in" so you have all of your services like drive, apps, mail etc accessed from one account. When you logon twice into two different accounts, it can get confused.

[J50N WA]

Create a shared inbox ([e-mail]), assign each user to that inbox. As for who's working on what, right click on any email and set flags/categories with names, so you basically assign yourself to that email.

set some rules, this is the priority use inbox, that as soon as a item is dealt with its gets moved to a saved folder and out of the inbox. Anything for the whole team to see gets a 'leave in Inbox' flag..