By the Onsites AI team · Last updated · 5-minute read
Every small team starts the same way: a personal mailbox, a couple of aliases, and a quiet agreement that "someone" will watch info@. It works for two months. Then an inquiry from your best customer sits unanswered for two days while three people each assumed the other had it, someone replies from their personal address, and the thread forks into three copies nobody can find again. A shared inbox is the fix — one address, one queue, one owner per conversation. This guide sets one up for free in about ten minutes, then covers the habits that keep it alive, because the software is the easy half.
The classic small-team pattern is a group alias that CCs everyone. It fails for structural reasons, not because your team is careless. When mail lands in five personal inboxes, there is no concept of ownership: nothing marks a conversation as claimed, so effort is duplicated or, worse, nobody claims it. When two people answer, the customer receives two different responses — occasionally the same answer twice, occasionally contradictory ones. And when someone leaves the company, their mailbox takes unreplied threads and half your context with it.
A shared queue solves each precisely. Conversations exist in one place that is not anyone's personal mailbox. Taking a conversation means visibly claiming it; colleagues see claimed items in the same list instead of guessing. Internal context travels as private notes that customers never see. When a teammate leaves, the queue keeps every thread and its history — onboarding a replacement means granting a seat, not an archaeology expedition through a departed employee's sent folder.
Create a free workspace from the start page, then connect your mail in Settings → Channels → Email. Three options: forwarding — point your existing address (support@, info@, or a new one) at the desk and every forwarded message becomes a conversation; your own domain — verify a DNS record and send and receive directly from your real addresses, which is the cleaner long-term setup; or IMAP import — pull existing mailbox history in so conversations that predate the desk keep their threads. Replies are sent from the shared address with the full thread underneath, so customers experience one continuous conversation no matter who on the team answers.
While you are there, set working hours so customers know when to expect a reply — a stated window reads as professionalism, an unstated one as silence. Three people can work the desk free from day one; the fourth seat costs $15 per month when you need it.
1 · Ownership on arrival. The first person who reads a new conversation claims it — visibly, in the queue, not by replying from memory. Unclaimed conversations older than an hour are everyone's business at the daily check-in. This single habit eliminates the "I thought you had it" failure mode that shared mailboxes are famous for.
2 · Internal context in notes, never in the thread. The customer-visible reply says the decision; the private note says the reasoning, the history, the "careful, this customer was burned by the last supplier". If it lives in a side email or someone's memory, the next person who touches the thread starts blind.
3 · Tags at close, not at open. Tagging when a conversation closes costs five seconds and produces the only reporting anyone ever acts on: what customers actually write about, by volume, per week. Opened-at tags rot because topics change mid-thread; closed-with tags reflect what the conversation turned out to be. The tags and views guide proposes a starter vocabulary.
4 · Saved replies with one edited line. Greetings, "need one more detail", refunds explained, delays announced — save the boilerplate, then hand-edit the personal line. A reply that is visibly a template with the customer's name pasted in reads worse than no reply at all. The canned responses guide covers the twenty templates worth saving first.
5 · The end-of-day sweep. Five minutes before closing: everything still unclaimed gets claimed, everything claimed gets replied or gets a note saying exactly what it waits on. Nothing crosses midnight without an owner and a next step. This is what "response time" customers actually experience — not your average, your worst evening.
First-touch owns. Readers claim conversations as they arrive. Fast, zero configuration, and self-balancing on busy days — but it punishes whoever opens the queue first, so pair it with the daily sweep.
Round-robin. The desk's auto-assignment rules deal conversations to the next person in sequence. Even loading by construction; best when volume is steady and your team handles similar work.
Channel or topic owners. Whoever knows billing owns billing, whoever knows shipping owns shipping. Best expertise match; requires tags to be honest about routing, which habit 3 gives you.
Small teams outgrow models quietly: if "who has this?" gets asked twice a day, move from first-touch to round-robin. If the same issues keep coming back to the same expert, make ownership by topic formal.
Never answer in a side channel. The moment a reply happens from a personal mailbox, the shared inbox is a lie — the queue shows silence while the customer got an answer nobody else can see. If a customer replies to an old thread by accident, forward it in; if a colleague answered a related question yesterday, link the thread.
Write notes in public voice. "Customer claims the 40ft quote never arrived — checked, sent 14:03, resending" is a note the next shift can act on. "ugh this guy again" is not. Notes are read by teammates and, one reorganization later, by the new hire you have not met — write so that person looks good.
Close decisively. A conversation left open "just in case" is queue noise that makes every real backlog look worse. Tag it, close it, and let new messages reopen it automatically — they will, and that reopening is itself a signal worth a tag.
Once the five habits hold for two weeks, add the system layer: views ("unclaimed over 2h", "billing this month", "waiting on customer") so the queue answers questions instead of just listing mail; a first-response SLA that turns working hours into an escalation trigger; and the weekly export ritual from the data ownership guide, which on free-tier cloud is your backup of record since server-side backups are a paid feature. At that point the shared inbox has quietly become a help desk — same queue, but the numbers, the ownership and the memory are all working for you. When a fourth teammate or your own servers enter the picture, the full setup guide picks up exactly there.
What is the difference between a shared inbox and a regular group alias?
A group alias forwards each message to several personal inboxes, so ownership is invisible and replies fork into private threads. A shared inbox is one queue where conversations are claimed, assigned, annotated with private notes and closed — with the whole history visible to the team and preserved when someone leaves.
How many people can work a free shared inbox?
The free cloud plan includes three seats with the full product. A fourth seat costs $15 per seat per month, prorated daily.
Can we keep using our existing support@ address?
Yes — forward it into the desk, or verify your own domain to send and receive from the real addresses. IMAP import brings existing mailbox history along so nothing older than the desk is lost.
How do we stop conversations from being answered twice?
Claim conversations visibly on arrival, use private notes for internal context, and run an end-of-day sweep where every open conversation has an owner and a next step. Round-robin auto-assignment removes the claiming step entirely.
Does a shared inbox keep the history if a teammate leaves?
Yes — conversations and their full history stay in the queue. A replacement joins with a new seat and sees every prior thread, note and tag; nothing lives only in a departed colleague's mailbox.