A shared info@ inbox that actually works in Gmail

The short answer

Stop sharing the password. In Google Workspace, create a Google Group with the address [email protected], add your staff as members, then switch on the group's Collaborative Inbox features. Everyone reads and answers info@ from their own login, and each conversation can be taken, assigned to a named person and marked complete. Add info@ as a "send mail as" address in each person's Gmail so replies come from the business. If you'd rather keep info@ as a normal mailbox, Gmail delegation is the alternative. The steps below cover both.

Why sharing one login breaks

You can't tell who replied to what. Two people open the same enquiry, both start typing, and one reply overwrites or contradicts the other. Drafts vanish when a colleague opens the same message, and when a customer says "I already told you this", nobody can check who they told. Gmail itself objects too: Google's own help notes that several people signing in to one account from different locations can trigger a temporary lockdown.

Then there's security. One shared password, written on a sticky note, that never changes because too many people rely on it. When someone leaves there's no clean way to cut their access without resetting everyone else, so mostly it never gets reset at all.

Google Workspace already has the fix, in two flavours. The main one is a Google Group with Collaborative Inbox features turned on: mail to info@ goes to the group, everyone answers from their own login, and conversations get assigned to a named person and marked complete. The other is Gmail delegation, which suits an info@ that's a real mailbox with one owner. Both are below.

1. Create a group with the info@ address

Do this from the Admin console rather than the Groups website; Google's help says the Admin console is the best way to create a group, and it's the route I'd take every time. Sign in at admin.google.com, then Menu, Directory, Groups, and click Create group (this needs the Groups administrator privilege). Give the group a name like Enquiries and set the group email to your info@ address. One warning straight from Google's guidance: in a work or school account the address can end up with a suffix like -user-created bolted on, which is exactly what you don't want on a public email address, so check the address that actually gets created before you publish it anywhere.

One address can only point at one thing, so if info@ currently exists as an alias on somebody's mailbox, remove that alias first to free it up.

When you're asked for an access type (Public, Team, Announcement only or Restricted), the setting that actually matters is Who can post. Your customers are outside your organisation, so posting must be open to external senders (anyone on the web), otherwise email from outside won't get in; you can click the cells in the access table to customise this. Then add your staff as members. New members get the "All email" subscription by default, which means every enquiry also lands in their own inbox.

[email protected]

2. Turn on Collaborative Inbox and set permissions

Now go to groups.google.com, click the group's name, then Group settings in the left panel. Under "Enable additional Google Groups features", select Collaborative Inbox. Google requires conversation history to be switched on for the group first. If groups.google.com says Groups isn't available at all, whoever administers your Workspace needs to turn on Groups for Business.

Two permission settings on the same settings page decide who can actually use the features. "Who can moderate metadata" covers taking, assigning and marking a conversation complete, so set it so all group members have it. Marking a conversation as a duplicate or as needing no action requires "Who can moderate content", so open that to members too.

3. Work the inbox: take, assign, mark complete

Day to day the group has two faces. Each member sees new enquiries in their own Gmail inbox (that's the All email subscription), and the group's page at groups.google.com shows the queue with its assignment and status. The workflow lives on the group page.

Open a conversation and click Take to claim it yourself, or Assign to hand it to a colleague; you enter their address and an optional note, and they get an automated email telling them it's theirs. Drop unassigns it. When the enquiry is dealt with, click Mark as complete. No action needed and Mark as duplicate cover spam and repeats.

The down arrow in the search bar filters by these states, so "Assigned to me" becomes a personal to-do list and filtering to unresolved is the morning check that nothing's been missed. If you want categories (orders, complaints, bookings), Groups also lets you apply labels to conversations, which work across the assignment and status filters.

4. Make replies come from info@, not from you

If a member replies from their own inbox, the customer sees that person's own address. To reply as the business, each person adds info@ as a send-as address: in Gmail, click Settings, then See all settings, then the Accounts and Import tab. In the "Send mail as" section, click Add another email address, enter the business name and the info@ address, then Send verification.

Gmail emails a verification link to info@, which is now the group, so look there for a message from [email protected] (check spam too). That message comes from outside your domain, which is why the group's posting permission needs to allow anyone on the web, as set in step 1; Google's help calls this out specifically for group aliases.

Once verified, the From line when composing becomes clickable and you pick info@. Click Edit info next to the new entry and set a "reply to" address of info@, so the customer's next message comes back to the group rather than to you personally; Google notes replies default to your original address otherwise. One quirk to know about: some recipients, typically on Outlook, may see the reply as sent "on behalf of" the address.

5. The delegation alternative, and where it stops

If info@ is already a real mailbox of its own (an actual user account, not a group), Gmail delegation shares it without sharing the password. Sign in as info@, go to Settings, See all settings, Accounts and Import, and under "Grant access to your account" click Add another account and enter a colleague's address. They get an invitation that expires after a week, and Google says it can take up to 24 hours before their access works.

Delegates open the mailbox from their own Gmail by clicking their profile picture and choosing the account marked "Delegated". They can read, send and delete, and when a delegate sends a message their own address appears on it, so you keep the who-did-what trail that password sharing destroys.

The limits are real, though. There's no taking, assigning or marking complete; it's shared access, not a workflow. Delegates can't change the password (good) but also lose Chat and helpers like Smart Compose. A work account can have up to 1,000 delegates on paper, but Google says with typical use about 40 can access it at the same time. Delegation suits an owner plus an assistant or two; a team queue is better off as a Collaborative Inbox.

Where this gets hard

In the setups I see, the mess is rarely the new group, it's the old info@. Usually the address is an alias on the founder's mailbox, or a full mailbox with years of history, and it can't point at the group until it's freed. That means picking the moment to switch, keeping the old mail somewhere searchable, and making sure nothing sent mid-changeover falls down the gap. Deliverability matters too: once replies go out as info@, your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records need to be right or those replies land in spam (see https://lodesa.co.uk/library/spf-dkim-dmarc-setup).

Groups itself has sharp corners. The permission settings interact, so a group that happily receives customer email can still refuse the send-as verification message, and a locked-down Who can post silently keeps enquiries out. And because every member gets every message in their own inbox, people tend to reply from there and never touch the group page, at which point the assignment tracking you set up reflects nothing. It only works if marking things complete becomes a habit.

Be honest about scale, too. Assignment, status and shared labels are the whole feature list; there are no reply templates, no reporting, and nothing alerts you when an enquiry has sat unanswered for two days. For a handful of messages a day it's exactly right. At dozens a day across several staff, or when you need to prove response times, that's the point to move to a proper shared-inbox tool or help desk rather than fight Groups.

What you end up with

• Everyone handles info@ from their own login, and the shared password is gone for good
• Each enquiry can be taken or assigned to a named person, then marked complete, so nothing gets answered twice or not at all
• Replies reach the customer from [email protected], whoever wrote them
• When someone leaves, you remove them from the group like any other member; nobody resets a password

Facts on this page last checked 14 July 2026, against support.google.com.

Related fixes

If your info@ is already knotted into someone's personal mailbox, or the volume has outgrown what a Group can manage, I'm happy to look at it with you and map the clean way across.