Setup guide
How to share support@ with your team in Gmail
Three ways to let a team answer support@yourcompany.com from Gmail — delegation, a Google Group, and forwarding to a shared inbox — and what each one costs you in practice.
Start here
What most teams try first: sharing the password
One mailbox, one password, everyone signed in. It works until two people open the same email. Google also treats simultaneous sign-ins from different places as suspicious, so the account gets locked at the worst possible moment, and there is no record of who replied to what.
The built-in way
What Gmail can do on its own, at no extra cost.
- 01
Open Gmail as the support@ account and go to Settings, then Accounts and Import.
- 02
Under «Grant access to your account», click «Add another account» and enter a colleague's address.
- 03
They accept the invitation by email, then switch into the mailbox from their own account menu.
- 04
Repeat for each colleague. Gmail delegation allows up to 25 delegates.
For a team of two or three this is often enough, and it costs nothing beyond the licences you already pay for. Do this first.
Where it stops
The mailbox can show what arrived. It cannot show who is on it.
- No ownership: nothing shows that a colleague has already taken a conversation
- No status: you cannot see what is still owed an answer without reading the whole inbox
- Delegates cannot change the mailbox's own settings or filters
- A Google Group with collaborative inbox turned on adds assignment, but it is a separate interface from Gmail and drops threading in practice
That is the whole problem a shared inbox tool exists to solve: ownership and status, visible to everyone, without anyone having to keep a convention alive. SharedReply does it for $29 per inbox with unlimited users; Hiver does it for $25 per user with more features around it. The two side by side.
Questions
The short answers.
- How do we let several people answer support@yourcompany.com in Gmail?
- Open Gmail as the support@ account and go to Settings, then Accounts and Import. Under «Grant access to your account», click «Add another account» and enter a colleague's address. They accept the invitation by email, then switch into the mailbox from their own account menu. Repeat for each colleague. Gmail delegation allows up to 25 delegates. That gives everyone access to the mailbox, but not ownership: nothing shows who has taken a conversation, which is where most teams eventually add a shared inbox tool.
- Does Gmail charge extra for this?
- No. Gmail delegation is included in Google Workspace at no extra cost, for up to 25 delegates.
- Do we have to change our support address to use SharedReply?
- No. You keep support@yourcompany.com and forward it to the address we give you. Your existing mailbox keeps receiving everything as before, so you can stop at any time by removing one forwarding rule.
- What does SharedReply cost?
- $29 per inbox per month, with unlimited users, so a team of 5 pays the same as a team of one. It is free while it is in beta.
Read next
Keep support@ where it is. Just let the team see it.
One forwarding rule in Gmail, and everyone sees every email, who owns it, and whether it has been answered.
Free while in beta. Unlimited users on every plan.