One address like support@ that a whole team can open — and the limits built into it.
Shared mailbox. A shared mailbox is a single email address — support@, info@, billing@ — that multiple people can access from their own email accounts. Provided by Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, a shared mailbox has no password of its own; members are granted access and can read the mail and send replies as the shared address.
An administrator creates the mailbox and grants members permission. In Microsoft 365 the shared mailbox then appears alongside each member’s personal folders in Outlook; in Google Workspace the closest equivalents are delegated mailboxes and Google Groups configured as collaborative inboxes. There is one message store — unlike a distribution list, which copies mail into every member’s personal inbox — so everyone sees the same folder, and replies go out as the shared address rather than a personal one. Most providers include shared mailboxes at no extra license cost, which is why nearly every team starts with one.
The important thing to understand is what a shared mailbox is not: it is an infrastructure feature, not a workflow. Email has no concept of ownership, status or assignment — so “who is handling this?” lives outside the mailbox, in chat messages and memory. Even read/unread is shared state that lies: the first person to open a message marks it read for everyone else.
At low volume with two or three disciplined people, a shared mailbox is genuinely enough — and the honest advice is to use one until it hurts. The failure is gradual rather than sudden: a customer gets two replies with different answers because neither sender could see the other typing; a thread sits silent because everyone assumed someone else had it. Both failures are invisible from inside the mailbox, which is exactly why they persist — nothing in the tool shows that anything went wrong.
Set one up through your admin console (Microsoft 365 admin center or Google admin), grant access to the people who answer, and agree on conventions the software will not enforce for you: labels or folders as makeshift statuses, a rule for claiming a thread before replying, an agreement that nobody archives what they did not finish. Written down, these conventions carry a small team surprisingly far — the mailbox fails when the conventions do, not when the volume does.
Then watch for the outgrowing signs: apologizing for double replies, threads found unanswered after days, a daily “who has this?” ritual in chat. Those signs mean the address is fine but the mechanics are missing — the difference between a shared mailbox and a shared inbox tool, which adds assignment, statuses and private notes on top of the same address, is covered in our shared inbox guide.
A shared mailbox is usually a team’s first support system — these entries cover its email-native sibling and the machinery teams graduate to.
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