If your team answers customers from a shared Gmail account, you already know the failure modes: nobody knows who replied, emails get read and then lost, and two people answer the same message. This is one shared mailbox where every conversation has an owner and a status — and it runs on your Google Workspace, on your own server.

Why not just use Gmail?

Google’s built-in way to let more than one person work an inbox is delegation — giving someone access to your account. It’s built for an assistant managing one person’s email, not for a team handling customers. Google documents the limits themselves:

	Gmail delegation	Shared mailbox
Who owns a conversation	Nobody — the concept doesn’t exist	Assign it to an agent
Where a conversation stands	Read or unread. Nothing else	New · In progress · Waiting · Escalated · Closed
What the customer sees	“Their email address appears”	Always your mailbox address
Response deadlines	Nothing tracks them	SLA timer, auto-escalation
Reporting	None	First response, resolution, per agent
Discussing a ticket internally	You’d have to email about it	Internal notes on the thread, invisible to the customer
Canned replies	Manual text snippets	`/` insert with fields filled from the ticket
People at once	“~40 typical” — fewer when APIs are used	Your whole team
Getting someone set up	“Up to 24 hours” — the invite expires in a week	They log in

A shared mailbox doesn’t delegate into someone’s personal inbox. It sits alongside your Gmail — same addresses, same threads — and adds the layer a team needs: ownership, status, deadlines, reporting.

Limits quoted from Google’s delegation documentation for Gmail.

Why not a cloud shared inbox?

Hiver, Front and Gmelius solve the same problem, and they’re good products. But they’re cloud services — which means your customers’ email is stored on their infrastructure, in a region they choose, under their security posture, for as long as you’re a customer.

For plenty of companies that’s a fair trade. It stops being a fair trade when:

you have data-residency obligations or client contracts specifying where data may live
your customers’ email contains information a third party shouldn’t be holding
you need the system to keep working if the vendor changes its pricing, its terms, or gets acquired
you’d simply rather not add another company to the chain between you and your customers

Your customer conversations never touch our servers

This one runs on your server — your office, your VPS, or your own AWS/GCP region — and the mail flows through the Google Workspace you already own. There’s no third place your customer conversations get copied to.

	Cloud shared inbox	Shared mailbox
Where customer email is stored	The vendor’s infrastructure	Yours
Which region	Their choice	Your choice
Who can access it	Their staff, under their policies	Your team only
If the relationship ends	You lose access	Your database is yours
Your own backup and retention rules	Limited to what they offer	Whatever your policy requires

You choose where it lives — on-premise, or a specific cloud region
No vendor access to customer data — we don’t hold a copy, because there isn’t one
Straightforward for compliance — residency obligations and internal policies are easier to satisfy when nothing leaves your control
Your mail stays in Gmail, where it already is — what this adds is the team layer on top, without adding another company that holds your customer data

What You Get

One shared queue, visible to everyone

List view and kanban board — work from a familiar inbox, or see the whole backlog as columns
Assignment — every conversation has an owner, and everyone can see who
Statuses so work can’t hide: New, In progress, Waiting on customer, Escalated, Closed
Internal notes the customer never sees, attached to the email itself
Live presence — see who’s online and who’s already drafting a reply, so nobody double-answers
@mentions with in-app and desktop notifications

Deadlines that enforce themselves

SLA per ticket with a visible countdown — green on track, amber as it approaches, red when overdue
Automatic escalation — an overdue ticket moves to Escalated on its own, with an audit note
Reporting — open and closed volume, SLA overdue count, average first-response and resolution time, per-agent workload
Customer satisfaction surveys — an optional one-question survey on close, rated and tied to the ticket

The email side, done properly

Replies stay in the customer’s existing thread — customers see a normal reply, not a new email
Real file attachments from customers are stored and downloadable
Canned responses inserted with /, with details filled in from the open ticket
Signatures per agent, with optional auto-insert
Contact history — every past conversation with that customer, plus their other open tickets
Bulk clean-up — search, select all matching, archive or mark as spam in one action
Non-English mail handled correctly — accents, emoji and encoded subject lines survive intact

Runs on your server, not ours

Your Google Workspace, your Gmail — connected through Google’s own API with domain-wide delegation, so customer mail flows through the mailbox you already have
Your infrastructure — it runs on your own server, so your customer conversations stay yours
Sign in with Google — agents use their existing Workspace account
Multiple mailboxes — support@, sales@, billing@ in one place, with per-mailbox access for your team

How It Works

We set it up on your server — or on a server we manage for you, if you’d rather not run it yourself.
We connect your mailboxes to your Google Workspace and import the mail you want to keep — or start fresh and only receive new mail.
Your team signs in and works. We’ll train them on it, and we maintain it from there.

Who It’s For

It’s worth having when more than two or three people answer customers, when response time actually matters, or when losing one conversation costs more than fixing the process.

If you’re a team of two answering ten emails a day, a label and a shared password is honestly fine — we’ll tell you that on the call.

Still weighing it up?

We wrote up what actually breaks when a team shares one Gmail account — the five failure modes, what a shared inbox fixes, and what to look for when comparing tools. No pitch, and it’s useful even if you don’t use ours.

Shared Mailbox for Google Workspace