Collision detection for shared inboxes

The term comes up the moment a team shares an address the old way. A Gmail or Outlook shared mailbox gives everyone the mail and no one the awareness: no presence, no ownership, no way to know a colleague hit reply thirty seconds ago. (The full anatomy of that setup is in the shared inbox guide.) Collision detection is the fix — and in inrelay it’s less a warning light than a whole way of owning conversations.

Why it matters

Here’s the collision every support team eventually ships. A customer asks about a refund. Two teammates open the thread minutes apart. One approves the refund; the other, a faster typist, quotes the returns policy. The customer now holds two contradictory answers on one thread — and whichever one you honour, you’ve taught them that your answers are negotiable.

Duplicate replies are only the visible half. The mirror failure is the thread nobody answers, because everyone assumed someone else had it. Both are ownership failures, which is why the point of collision detection is to make double replies — and dropped threads — a near-zero event instead of a weekly apology.