Almost every business starts the same way. Enquiries arrive at one address, that address belongs to one person, and that person deals with them. It is simple, nothing gets lost, and there is no system to maintain.
Then a second person needs to see them. Then somebody goes on holiday. Then a customer rings about an email that was answered three weeks ago by somebody who is not in today, and nobody can find it.
The move away from a personal inbox is not really a technical decision. It is a decision about whether anything important should depend on one person being available.
The signs you are past the point
Forwarding. Messages being sent on to a colleague, who replies from their own address, so the customer now has two people and two addresses in one conversation and no idea which to use.
“Did anyone answer this?” Asked out loud, across a room or a group chat, about a message anybody could have picked up. Every instance is a message that either got two replies or none.
A shared password. More on this below, because it deserves its own warning.
Holidays creating gaps. If somebody being away means enquiries wait, the address is a single point of failure, and customers experience that as being ignored.
A departed colleague’s mailbox still open. Kept alive because things still arrive there, which means it is still a working address that nobody is really responsible for.
No history. A customer refers to a previous conversation and whoever is dealing with them cannot see it.
One of those is a nuisance. Three of them is costing you work you never find out about.
Why sharing a password is the wrong answer
It is the quickest fix and it is worth resisting properly.
Everybody signing in as the same account means nothing can be attributed to anybody, so there is no way to know who replied or who deleted something. It makes multi-factor authentication awkward at exactly the point it matters most, because the codes arrive on one person’s phone, which is why shared accounts are so often the ones left unprotected. And when somebody leaves, the only way to revoke their access is to change the password for everybody, which never happens promptly.
If you want the practical case for getting multi-factor authentication on properly, our step-by-step guide covers it. A shared password is the thing that quietly prevents all of that.
Three things that sound similar and are not
A distribution list takes a message and sends a copy to several people. Everybody sees it, nobody owns it, and replies go out from personal addresses. It is the most common wrong answer, because it looks like sharing while actually multiplying the confusion. It is genuinely useful for announcements going out, and poor for anything that needs answering.
A shared mailbox is a single mailbox that several people open alongside their own, each signing in as themselves. Replies go out from the shared address rather than a personal one, everything sent and received sits in one place, and on the common business platforms it does not need a licence of its own. For most small businesses, this is the answer.
A group sits between the two, giving a shared inbox with its own membership and often a shared calendar and files. Useful for a team that works together on more than email, and heavier than most enquiry addresses need.
The distinction that matters is whether the conversation lives in one place that everybody can see, or in several copies that nobody can reconcile.
Making a shared mailbox actually work
The technology is the easy half. The convention is what makes it work.
Agree who looks. “Everybody” means nobody. Even a loose rota, or one person owning mornings, beats an assumption.
Agree what handled looks like. The simplest workable convention is that a message stays in the inbox until it has been dealt with, then moves to a folder. If it is in the inbox, it is somebody’s job. That one rule prevents most double replies.
Send as the shared address. If replies go out from a personal address, customers learn to write to that person instead, and within a month you are back where you started.
Put it in the signature and on the website. The shared address only works if it is the one people use.
Keep one person accountable. Not for answering everything, but for noticing when things are sitting too long.
Check what happens to mail sent to people who have left. In a lot of businesses those mailboxes are still receiving, sometimes forwarding to somebody who does not really read them. Every one of those addresses is a route into your business with nobody genuinely responsible for it.
The move is a good moment for a tidy-up
Whatever you move to, do not carry ten years of a personal inbox into it.
The enquiries address should start with what is current. Archive the rest somewhere you can search if you need to, rather than importing it wholesale, and you will avoid inheriting a mailbox that is halfway to full on the day it opens. The practicalities of that, including what is safe to clear, are covered in what to do when your mailbox is full.
It is also the natural moment to look at which addresses you actually need. Most businesses accumulate more than they use, and each one is another thing to watch.
Where a shared mailbox runs out
It will take you a long way, and then it will start to strain in a specific pattern.
Two people begin replying to the same message, because there is no way to claim one. Discussion about how to answer something happens in a separate chat, so the reasoning is not attached to the conversation. Nobody can say how long things are taking, or whether anything has been sitting unanswered for a week. And when a customer comes back six months later, the history is theoretically there and practically unfindable.
None of those are reasons to panic, and none of them arrive on day one. They are the signal that the next step is worth considering, which is where this series goes next.
Where to start
Write down every address enquiries currently arrive at, who reads each one, and what happens when that person is away. That exercise alone usually identifies the one address that matters most and has the least cover.
Then move that one, and only that one, to a shared mailbox with the conventions above. Doing it for one address properly teaches you more than planning it for six.
Setting this up, including migrating what should come across and leaving behind what should not, is part of how we look after business email. If you are at the point where forwarding has stopped being funny, get in touch.