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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.
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.
November 29, 2024
Google Collaborative Inbox: Why Your Teams Won't Like It
Google's Collaborative Inbox offers a way to manage shared email addresses, but it has some flaws.
At its core, email was designed to be addressed to a single individual, just like regular mail.
But with more and more businesses starting to increase their online presence, catch-all email addresses (info@, sales@, support@) began to increase. And with no way to efficiently distribute the workload of these catch-all addresses, email quickly became a burden. To resolve the problem, it wasn't uncommon to see people use the oldest hack in the book:
Sharing individual account passwords.
It might have worked very early on when online security was not a big thing for most organizations. But email providers, like Gmail, quickly started dissuading this practice by temporarily locking people's accounts when detecting multiple sign-ins to the same account. As an alternative, Google offers Google Groups and its Collaborative Inbox.
But what is it exactly? And is it the solution you’re looking for? Let's find out!
Google Collaborative Inbox is a free feature of Google Groups available to businesses using Google Workspace (also known as G Suite). It can be used by teams to manage shared email accounts that are meant to be shared mailboxes, such as support@ or info@.
While not a complete shared inbox software solution, it offers more robust features than Gmail when it comes to email collaboration.
To simplify things, Google Collaborative Inbox is a shared email folder that members of a group can access through their own accounts.
The idea is that group members can access a shared email address securely. All members can email everyone in the group and can also allow external emails. They can assign conversations to different group members, mark the progress, create labels, and filter them.
It’s the simple evolution of a distribution list, allowing teams to somewhat collaborate around a shared mailbox.
Google Collaborative Inbox allows teams using Google Workspace to access a basic shared mailbox without the need of other software.
It can be used to manage email addresses that need to be accessed by a group of people. The benefits of using Collaborative Inbox come mostly from the collaborative nature of the feature and not the tool itself.
Here are the benefits of a having a shared mailbox with collaboration functionalities:
Google Collaborative Inbox sounds great, but according to its users, the solution is complex to use yet limited in its features.
Your customer support and sales teams will certainly be the most impacted. Here are the most important ones:
The UI is unfamiliar and doesn’t integrate into the Gmail inbox. So your team will have to shuffle between the two apps. It also means that you can't manage all your email from one place.
You cannot easily discuss an issue with a coworker in the context of an email. Nor can emails truly be delegated. You need to either forward emails, which will generate more emails, or use the built-in chat, but you will need to describe the problem since your message won't be in context.
Replies to customers are sent from the individual's account, not the group email address, so you always need to remember also to send them to the group address. Otherwise, teammates will no longer see that email. And if the customer forgets to "reply-all", the email will never show up in the group's inbox. Emails can easily fall through the cracks.
If an email has been assigned to someone, other people won't see if others are already working on it, not until the reply is sent. This may lead to double responses, wasted time for your team, slower response time, and customers getting a negative impression of your organization.
There's no simple way for a manager to monitor emails from their team. Filtering is also a bit rudimentary, so important things might get easily overlooked.
You also need to switch between Gmail and the Google Groups UI to be on top of things. This also means that emails sent to the group address can't be read on mobile devices, because they cannot be accessed through a Gmail account or any other app.
Creating automation rules that help your team triage emails faster is impossible. Everything needs to be done manually, which can lead to mistakes.
You can't centralize your team's communications. As we all know, customers nowadays contact organizations through various channels, like, Messenger, Instagram, SMS, etc.
To wrap things up, we could say that using Google's Collaborative Inbox is far from the right tool for the job. Lost emails, unclear ownership, unintuitive UI... Here's where Missive might prove to be an excellent weapon to keep in your arsenal.
You want to give Google Group Collaborative Inbox a shot?
Here’s how to (relatively) easily turn on the collaborative inbox features in Google Groups:
Managing the workflow of a Collaborative Inbox inside Google Groups can be done in a few different ways. Depending on the permissions you gave to each team member they can use Google Groups features to manage the shared folder of email.
You can assign a conversation to any group member including yourself to manage messages and responsibilities. Conversations can be sorted based on their assignment status.
You can mark a conversation as complete, no action required, or as a duplicate. Right next to the subject will be the status of the conversation.
You can organize your Collaborative Inbox by using labels on related conversations. Labels can be used in conversations no matter their assignment and resolution status.
Your best option when looking for an alternative to Google Groups’ Collaborative Inbox is dedicated email collaboration software for business.
While you have multiple options (refer to our top shared inbox software), we believe that this short list of alternatives are the ones that will check all the boxes to make your team love shared email.
Missive is a real collaborative inbox. It features team inboxes and chats that empower teams to collaborate not only around email but other channels of communication like SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and live chat.
Missive was built with collaboration in mind.
The Team Inbox lets you collaborate with team members and assign them to conversation. It is useful for teams who want a "triage" step that will clean up messages for all coworkers at once.
It lets you communicate with coworkers right inside an email thread. You can also @mention a colleague and start a conversation, all without leaving the email in question.
With Missive, you can create sets of rules that automate actions; these can save time and spare support employees from doing repetitive tasks. For example, all refund-related emails can be automatically assigned to the Finance team or a specific employee.
Price: Price: Free for up to 2 shared accounts. Starting at $15/month for more.
Gmelius is a good alternative for users that want to keep on using Gmail. Gmelius is a Gmail add-on that brings shared inboxes directly to the web app. It comes with features like chats with your coworkers in an email thread, adding labels, and assigning team members to an email.
Gmelius also offer Kanban-style board for project management directly in Gmail.
Price: Start at $15/month
Hiver is another solutions that is used on top of Gmail. This Chrome extension enables you to collaborate and manage your shared inbox in your existing Gmail account. It offers the standard shared mailbox functionalities such as assigning people to a conversation and tagging emails and comments privately in a discussion.
Hiver also comes with features like task automation and analytics.
Price: Starting at $19/month.
Helpwise is a good alternative to Google Group Collaborative Inbox. It offers a shared inbox similar to Missive, with a way collaborate on a shared alias with a focus on shared accounts like SMS, social media, and live chat.
It also lets you add an assignee to a conversation, tag emails, and chat with your coworkers.
Price: Free for 1 shared account. Starting at $15/month for more.
Help Scout is primarily a helpdesk software, but it can double a good shared inbox solution with features like live chat, and a knowledge base.
With it, you can manage shared emails, group emails together using labels, assign people to a conversation, chat with teammates, and tag conversations.
Price: Starting at $25/month.
Don't get me wrong. Gmail is a great email client for individuals. But when it comes to shared inboxes and team collaboration, Missive helps your team keep their eyes on the ball and move toward inbox zero.
Google Collaborative Inbox is a free feature of Google Groups that lets businesses using Google Workspace manage shared email addresses like support@ or info@ as a team.
A Collaborative Inbox is a feature of Google Groups that enables teams to collaborate on shared emails like info@. It acts as a shared folder where all emails from a shared alias go. It offers bare bones and basic shared inbox features.
Shared inboxes allow multiple coworkers to access email simultaneously. While each user maintains a personal account, their shared mailboxes can be accessed and managed by all.
