Guide

Out of the box, Missive lets you share emails with your coworkers by mentioning them in the chat. You can also enable automatic sharing of emails with your whole team, or specific people.

Supported configurations

Missive can adapt to any kind of shared email setup. If you are using shared inboxes, Google Groups, email forwarding, or just want a way to delegate your email work, Missive will help you collaborate around emails in a frictionless way.

Open your organization settings and select Email sharing:

When to use shared accounts?

Also known as “shared inboxes”, shared accounts allow you to let some or all of your coworkers view emails sent to an account you own. Once enabled, teammates you selected will receive all future emails from this account. This is a great way to share emails without giving away credentials.

If you are used to having multiple people simultaneously logged in to the same Gmail account, configuring a shared account in Missive has a big advantage: everyone has their own unread and archived state. This means a cleaner inbox and less confusion, since one person reading an email will leave the conversation unread for others. It will also become natural to archive an email for yourself when a coworker tells you they will take care of it.

Sharing an account also allows coworkers to reply on behalf of the owner. This is useful when your emails are delegated to an assistant, for instance. Delegate users can reply to emails with your address, name, and signature. They can also use their own name and signature, which is more appropriate in cases like customer support where emails are received at support@company.com but responses should feel personal, with the agent’s name and signature.

When to use shared addresses?

If you’d rather not give access to all emails received in your account, shared addresses let you share emails sent to specific To (or Cc) addresses only. This is useful when using a central inbox like admin@company.com with various aliases (eg. support@company.com, help@company.com) directed to different teams.

A shared address should also be added when an address (eg. contact@company.com) forwards emails to personal inboxes (eg. emma@ and ben@). This is the way Google Groups or DNS email forwarding works. Without a shared address, Missive users will receive these emails normally but in separate conversations, requiring @mentions to bring people together and collaborate. Adding contact@company.com as a shared address will make sure common emails are shared as soon as they are received.

Google Groups

Shared addresses are also what you need to setup if you are already sharing emails using Google Groups. For more details on configuring Google Groups, see this dedicated guide.

Forwarding email accounts

Shared addresses are also what you need to setup if you are using email forwarding at your domain registrar, like:

• GoDaddy forwading email accounts
• Gandi Mail forwarding addresses
• 1&1 Forwarding email addresses
• Dreamhost forward only email addresses
• cPanel forwarders

Common scenarios and how to achieve them

I want to share all emails received in an email account

You should configure a shared account. People you share it with will have access to the Gmail labels / IMAP folders and they will be able to send emails using the account address and its aliases.

1. Import the email account as a private account.
2. Select the people you want to share the account with.

I want to share only emails sent to a specific alias received in a personal/private email account

Let’s say you have an email account admin@acme.com and you don’t want to share all emails in it. You only want to share the emails sent to the alias help@acme.com, which is received by admin@acme.com.

1. Import admin@acme.com as a private account.
2. Add a shared address “help@acme.com” in your organization settings. You will receive a validation email containing a link you must click.
3. Select teammates you want to share help@acme.com emails with.

I want to collaborate around emails sent to multiple people through a Google Group

Let’s say help@acme.com emails are forwarded by a Google Group to everyone in your team: danielle@acme.com, etienne@acme.com, lucy@acme.com, etc.

1. Each user imports their email account, the one where they receive the Google Group forwards.
2. Add a shared address “help@acme.com” in your organization settings. You will receive a validation email containing a link you must click. You don’t have to select any people to auto-share emails with, because users already receive these emails in their personal account.
3. Each user adds help@acme.com as an alias on their personal account, assuming they want to send emails From: help@acme.com.

I don’t want to automatically share emails, I just want to collaborate on some of them

1. Mention your teammates in any private conversation to give them access to it. You can always remove someone’s access later on.

I want to automatically collaborate on emails sent to both me and a teammate

Let’s say claire@acme.com and hubert@acme.com want to automatically collaborate if someone sends an email like:

1. Both users import their email account as a private account.
2. Add shared addresses for both “claire@acme.com” and “hubert@acme.com” in your organization settings. You will receive validation emails containing a link you must click. Don’t select any people to auto-share emails with. This way, only emails sent to both Claire and Hubert will be shared between the two.

Last updated on December 6, 2017