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Email Collaboration: Why You Should Improve It
Blog →
by
Skyler Reeves
June 3, 2022
· Updated on
As more of the workforce demands flexible remote work options, we have to adapt so that we can still collaborate with our team at the same level from our homes that we would from the office.
To do that, we need a way to easily communicate about our customers and with our customers—in one place.
That’s not Slack. That’s email.
What we need is a platform built for email collaboration.
Email collaboration is the ability for multiple people to work together on an email. This can be by adding comments, editing the draft, or approving it before it is sent. The best way to do it is by using specialized software. You could also share access to the email account, but this comes with big security risks. The goal of email collaboration is to improve communication and workflow within a team.
Collaborative email is a type of email inbox software that multiple people can access and use and collaborate on email and tasks. It is most useful for teams that need to work on email together as a group, such as customer support teams or executives who delegate their Gmail account to an executive assistant.
Cost-conscious companies often create a shared mailbox in their Google Workspace, Gmail, or Microsoft Office accounts to make it easier for customers to reach them (e.g., info@acme.com) and share login information with everyone on a team that needs it.
Makes sense. Right?
The problem is that email was originally designed to be used by individuals. Sharing credentials to work collaboratively with people to triage and field incoming messages goes against the fundamental behavior of email.
When you try to use email this way, you end up wasting more time due to the inability to know who’s working on what—creating confusion at best and angry customers at worst.
Collaborative email software solves most of these problems by giving them a way to all work with multiple communication channels from a single place while simultaneously maintaining accountability with task management functionality for assigning responsibility, delegation, communication, rules, and other productivity enhancements.
And when more detail and planning is required for effective teamwork, most integrate with modern project management tools like Asana, Trello, and ClickUp.
Email collaboration improves communication and understanding between team members. It helps identify potential problems early on, and avoid miscommunication and duplication of effort.
Team collaboration was already hard enough prior to the pandemic, but with more companies choosing remote-first or a hybrid model, the utility and necessity of being able to coordinate and communicate asynchronously are only going to keep growing.
By using one of the best shared inbox software you can start working more efficiently with your coworkers.
The magnitude of benefits you can get from a collaborative inbox has a lot to do with the size of your team, the number, and the type of information you have to manage.
Common adopters of shared inbox apps are teams involved in:
Both outbound and inbound sales teams can use team inboxes to keep up with prospects and in-progress opportunities they’re trying to close.
Inbound teams can assign inbound sales requests to a central inbox (e.g. sales@acme.com) using rules like round-robin and others to reduce the time an interested buyer has to wait for a follow up from sales (especially since the longer they have to wait, the more likely they are to contact a competitor).
A lot of companies (both large and small businesses) don’t realize how much revenue they inadvertently lose during the sales process due to poor communication and due diligence.
Inbound Leads
For example, an inbound lead is ready to sign up for your platform but your organization decided it was a good idea to force prospects ready to give you money to sit through a demo and qualification process despite your product having an ACV (average customer value) of less than $2000.
After doing so, your prospect is ready to move forward and become a customer but their sales development rep or junior account executive goes on vacation without setting up any sort of handoff or OOO autoresponder, leaving a potential customer in limbo.
In Missive, you can set your schedule to Out of Office yourself or set it for a coworker’s email account if they forget. You can also create automation rules to send incoming emails to the entire team or send a webhook to store them in your CRM so an active opportunity doesn’t go cold.
Outbound Leads
For outbound, an outbound sales-development rep gets lucky after a thousand emails and finally gets a positive reply from a prospect who wants to learn more about a product or service your company has pitched. The SDR can loop in an account executive on the conversation to give them context prior to a sales call.
They can also create and leverage collaboration email templates that work well for one rep so the rest can use them too.
Customer success teams can proactively work with sales teams during the handoff phase to give new customers a world-class onboarding experience by keeping everyone on the same page about customer expectations, special needs, and those small critical details that make it feel like you’re rolling out the red carpet. Something not always made easy by popular help desk tools.
Customer success teams can also coordinate easily with other teams throughout the organization to understand issues the customer might have—especially whenever they’re pinging support trying to figure out how to cancel their subscription.
Having insight into these sorts of issues without having to deal with the mess of CC/BCCs and a million email threads can make the difference between retaining a customer and having them churn.
Customer support teams often see the most benefit from collaborative email.
With tools like Missive, support teams can receive and respond to support inquiries in real-time from traditional channels like email, but also instant messaging channels like live chat, SMS, and social media thanks to its Twilio and social integrations.
When you try to manage support inquiries from a shared inbox in the traditional way, it’s easy for customer issues to slip through the cracks and fail to get the attention they deserve in a timely manner.
This happens all the time and customer support teams need all the help they can to help customers solve their problems, keep them happy, and reduce churn.
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the lifeblood of the subscription business. Without predictable sources of revenue, it’s impossible to sustain your business over the long term. On the flip side, it’s critical to track churned MRR to assess how customer attrition affects your revenue. If you’re losing customers too quickly, it can seriously hurt your ability to grow.
— Patrick Campbell, Profitwell
How you treat your customers and the value you provide will dramatically impact where you fall on the chopping block whenever economic shifts and markets change.
Failing to address churn by giving customer support (and success) the tools they need while simultaneously investing ridiculous amounts of capital into sales software and more SDRs to spam the market isn’t a sustainable growth strategy.
Accounts receivable and accounts payable teams can tackle outstanding payments due and vendor invoices quickly and efficiently. Especially whenever an approval process is required or back-and-forth communication needs to occur.
Executives in businesses of all sizes can get a ton of benefits from collaborative email when working with an executive assistant or chief of staff.
Being able to easily delegate incoming and outgoing emails from multiple emails via an alias can ensure things flow smoothly from the top down.
A good EA can also manage your inbox collaboratively without having to share your email credentials and lose insight into what’s been addressed and what hasn’t. Whether that’s responding to an important customer or helping you achieve inbox zero.
This is especially important for smaller businesses leveraging a VA remotely who aren’t quite ready to hand over login credentials to their email.
Slack promised to be the email killer—but it’s ~~2022~~ 2023 and email is still here.
Keeping up with what’s going on throughout our organizations both internally and externally isn’t going to get any easier.
As our teams and work, we do become more decentralized our communication needs to become more centralized if we want to continue to keep up with what’s most important and provide the best experience for the customers we possibly can.
Email was originally designed for individual use, and the standard way of doing email fails when it comes to collaboration. While many companies create shared mailboxes to make it easier for customers to reach them, sharing credentials to manage incoming emails goes against the fundamental behavior of email.
A collaborative email software provides a solution to this problem. It is a type of email inbox software that multiple people can access and use to collaborate on email and tasks. This type of software is most useful for teams that need to work on email together as a group, such as customer support teams or executives who delegate their Gmail account to an executive assistant.
An email collaboration tool benefits any company, small or big, with a team that needs to manage and respond to emails. This includes customer support teams, sales teams, project teams, and executives who delegate their email accounts to assistants.
By using an email collaboration tool, team members can access and work on emails together, assign responsibilities, delegate tasks, communicate effectively, and set rules to enhance their productivity. This allows for improved collaboration, efficiency, and accountability.
Furthermore, email collaboration tools can benefit remote teams by providing a centralized platform for communication and collaboration, regardless of geographic location. Additionally, team members can access the same information and messages in real-time, making it easier to collaborate on tasks and projects.
September 16, 2025
The 6 most secure email clients for collaborative teams
We looked at 6 of the most popular email clients for teams on the market, and scored them on 6 criteria: security hygiene, auditing & accountability, access, removal, and sign-in controls, privacy & data handling, external verification, and data residency.
There are lots of secure email clients on the market—Tutanota, ProtonMail, StartMail. But many of these fail to have the helpful collaborative features of more modern business email clients. Where you can have internal comments, real-time drafting, powerful automations, all in an intuitive interface.
Tutanota - Tutanota is a top tier secure email provider. It offers end-to-end encryption, send encrypted emails, but zero collaborative functionality or third-party integrations.
ProtonMail - ProtonMail is a close competitor to Tutanota. It allows you to send password-protected encrypted emails, open source mobile apps, but no collaborative features.
StartMail - StartMail is another secure email provider. It offers local storage with ISO 27001 certified data centers and out of the box phishing and spam protection, but like the other two options, it has little collaborative functions.
If you just need a few shared labels, email aliases, and calendars to make your team more productive, then any of these options would work great. But if you often have multiple team members working on email threads and/or high volumes of emails that need to be coordinated amongst multiple people—you'll want to look into true collaborative email clients.
If you rely on email for your business and you work with sensitive information, you'll want to know which of these shiny collaborative email clients have robust security and privacy standards underneath the hood.
Note: If you require a very high level of privacy like PGP, you're better off with one of the traditional options (i.e. Tuta) or Mailfence/Posteo/Zoho Mail for small businesses. But if PGP and full end-to-end encryption is not required, then keep reading on...
We looked at 6 of the most popular email clients for teams on the market, and scored them on 6 criteria:
As a benchmark, we compared each of them to the gold standard of secure email providers and email security—Outlook/Microsoft 365.
Let's get into it.
Outlook is the most popular email service and email client for enterprises, especially those who deal with sensitive client information over email. Outlook has unmatched configuration options and incredibly detailed auditability.
Auditability is particularly important for professional industries like healthcare, finance, and public sector companies which have recording keeping requirements by law. Here's Outlook's score:
Bottom line: There's a reason why Outlook is the email service of choice for enterprises. Now, if only they could do collaboration well.
Missive is a collaborative inbox designed for teams that supports all email service providers, including IMAP accounts. While it doesn't offer end-to-end encryption, it does have very high security standards, auditability, and external verification.
Price: Starts at $14/user/month, paid annually.
Bottom line: Missive checks the boxes that most teams look for (SSO, SOC 2, TLS encryption) and is clear in public docs. Audit depth & residency options aren’t M365-level, hence the gap.
Superhuman is a productivity-first email service build for high volume inboxes who loves shortcuts. It offers less collaboration functionality than others on this list, but it shines on it's access/removal functionality. By default, Superhuman does insert a pixel in all emails for it's read receipt feature, that might be a privacy concern for some.
Price: Starts at $25/user/month, paid annually.
Bottom line: If you already run Okta/Entra and need fast onboarding/offboarding, Superhuman’s Identity and Access Management system is excellent. Balance that with the privacy policy’s scope.
Hiver started is the Gmail-only option on this list. It has a a lot of the collaborative email functions like Missive but most of their customers use it as an alternative to a help desk. Here's how they rank from a security perspective:
Price: Starts at $19/user/month, paid annually.
Bottom line: If your priority is “don’t duplicate email content in another vendor,” Hiver is attractive for Google Workspace shops.
Shortwave is the most AI-forward email service on this list. They don't excel at any security standard compared to the other options, but they're a good middle ground option if you're looking for some thing with a lot of AI functionality and you're not required to have solid audit logs.
Price: Starts at $24/user/month, paid annually.
Bottom line: Great in Google-first orgs, but if you need audit trails for compliance/forensics for your industry, you'll probably want a different option.
Spark is used by individuals and teams. They offer a familiar interface with some collaboration functionality, though they are the lightest security option on this list.
Price: Starts at $4.99/month for individuals and $6.99/user/month for teams, paid annually.
Bottom line: Individual teams that want a polished client and understand the implications of server-side features for notifications/scheduling.
Tuta, ProtonMail or even Zoho Mail has a lot of the enterprise-grade security features (encrypted mail, PGP, etc) right out of the box, but the collaborative-first email clients we mentioned here might be able to meet your security standards with a little custom development. For example, you can feed all of the data/comms out to a third-party compliance service to make sure you hit the regulatory requirements.
At the end of the day, it'll depend on what trade offs you're willing or unwilling to make. Most businesses want some level of security but also usability and collaboration. How much of each will depend greatly on your use case.
Which of these options offer end-to-end encryption and encrypted emails?
Short answer is none. While most of these options have some form of encryption, the higher scoring ones are encrypted via TLS at rest and in transit, but none of them offer the same level of encryption features as Tuta or ProtonMail.
Is Outlook “more secure” than these tools?
It’s more controllable out of the box—especially for audit, labeling/IRM, and data residency. That’s why we use it as the baseline. Your best option is the one that fits your constraints and is configured well.
Do these tools read my emails?
Policies differ. Some tools process email content to power features (e.g., read receipts, scheduling, AI summaries). Some store only metadata. Always confirm what’s stored and for how long.
Are there other options with different encryption options?
If you're primarily looking for encryption features, but don't want to go with your standard Tuta, then you might want to check out Zoho Mail, Mailfence, or Posteo. The latter options offer OpenPGP end-to-end encryption and the former is basically enterprise level controls that isn't Outlook.
May 21, 2025
Collaborate beyond your team: Guest Access is here
We designed Guest Access for anyone you occasionally collaborate with (think your accountant, a third-party vendor, seasonal workers, etc).
Remember the first time you @mentioned a teammate below an email, instead of forwarding it to them?
That’s a magical moment for many Missive users.
It’s when they realized email can be collaborative without creating more email.
Starting today, with Guest Access, you can give that same experience to anyone you work with — even if they’re not on your team.
Guest Access makes it easy to bring people outside your organization — like an accountant, contractor, or client — directly into specific Missive conversations.
No more forwarding long threads. No more stitching together feedback from different tools. Just real-time chat alongside the emails that matter.
Here’s how it works:
Your guest will get an email with a link to join. Once they create a free Missive account, they’ll land directly in the conversation you invited them to.
They’ll be able to read the full message history and reply via chat — but not email, tasks, or assignments. Just focused, limited access.
Guest Access is included in all Missive plans. No add-ons. No hidden costs.
Each team member can invite up to 5 guests, and each guest can access up to 5 conversations.
That means if your team has 10 users, you can collaborate with up to 50 guests across 250 guest-enabled conversations — all for free.
We designed Guest Access for the people you don’t work with every day, but still need to collaborate with effectively — without paying for a full seat or dragging another tool into the mix.
If you’ve ever said:
I wish this person could just see this conversation—now they can.
Guest Access isn’t just for external vendors or partners. If you have teammates who don’t need full Missive functionality every day, Guest Access is a perfect lightweight option. No need to buy a full seat just to loop someone in occasionally.
By default, any team member can invite guests. But admins can manage this in:
Settings → Guests → Allow guest invitations
You can:
Want tighter control? You can restrict guest invitations so only admins or the org owner can send them. That way, access stays centralized and intentional.
Guests can:
Guests cannot:
This keeps their access simple, focused, and secure.
Admins can see which guests are active and what they have access to. If you need to invite new guests but hit your limit, you can quickly revoke access from inactive ones to free up slots.
We can’t wait to see how you use Guest Access.
Whether you’re looping in a freelance designer, a tax advisor, or just a teammate who doesn't need a full Missive seat — Guest Access gives you the power to collaborate where the conversation is happening.
Try it today and let us know what you think!
Can guests see the full history of the conversation?
Yes. Guests can view the entire message and chat history of any conversation they’re invited to.
Can guests reply to emails or send new ones?
No. Guests can only send chat messages. They cannot interact with the email side of the conversation.
Can guests be assigned to tasks or create tasks?
No. Guests don’t have access to task-related features in Missive.
Can guests @mention team members?
Yes. Guests can use @mentions in the chat area of the conversation to address specific people already present in the conversations. They can’t @mention people not present in the conversation.
What happens if I remove a guest from a conversation?
They will instantly lose access to that conversation and all its content.
Can I re-invite someone after removing them?
Absolutely. You can revoke access at any time and re-invite them later if needed.
Can I upgrade a guest to a full team member later?
Yes. If someone needs broader access, you can always add them as a regular user by assigning them a seat.
What if my guest has their own Missive organization?
They will be able to access the conversation(s) that you granted them, from their existing Missive interface. It will be treated like any other conversation.
