Shared inbox
A shared inbox is a mailbox the whole team can access, where every conversation has an assigned owner, a status and a history visible to everyone. It replaces forwarding emails between colleagues and the generic address one person quietly runs.
What is shared inbox?
A shared inbox is a mailbox the whole team can access, where every conversation has an assigned owner, a status and a history visible to everyone. It replaces forwarding emails between colleagues and the generic address one person quietly runs.
Also: team inbox · shared mailbox
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the first step for any support team and the one that changes day-to-day work most. Without it there is no way to know how many questions are outstanding, no way to split the work, and every absence blocks whatever that person had half-finished. The gain is not answering better: it is making the work visible.
Shared inbox in detail
What separates it from an email alias
An alias distributes copies; a shared inbox assigns responsibility. With an alias, two people answer the same thing or nobody answers anything, and both situations show up in the first week.
The rule that makes it work
Every conversation either has an owner or is unassigned, and no intermediate status means "somebody is probably looking at it". The moment there is a grey area, that grey area fills up.
When it stops being enough
When most replies need data living in another tool. At that point the bottleneck stops being organisation and becomes the distance between the conversation and the data.
How Intake handles it
Questions about shared inbox
Shared inbox or help desk?
The shared inbox is one part of what a help desk does. Many teams start with an inbox and add the rest — help centre, reports, automations — when they need it.
From how many people does it become necessary?
From two. With a single person answering, a well-organised mailbox holds up considerably longer than people tend to say.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Help desk — Help desk
A help desk is the team and the tool that receive user questions and resolve them. It centralises in one place whatever arrives by email, chat or form, turns each question into a ticket with a status and an owner, and keeps the history of what was answered.
Ticket
A ticket is the record of a customer question inside a support tool. It groups every message in that conversation under one identifier and adds what is needed to manage it: status, owner, priority, tags and the history of what has happened.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel describes support where the customer can write through whichever channel they prefer — chat, email, WhatsApp, phone — and the conversation stays a single thread: the history travels with them and they repeat nothing when switching channel.
Support agent
A support agent is the person who handles incoming customer questions: reads them, finds the context needed to answer, resolves them or escalates them to whoever should take over. It is a reactive job by definition, and the work is measured in response time, resolution and satisfaction.
Macro
A macro is a saved reply inserted into a conversation with one click, usually with fields that fill themselves in — the customer name, the order number. It exists so nobody rewrites from scratch what has already been answered many times.
Routing
Routing is the set of rules deciding which queue or which person each incoming conversation goes to: by detected language, by customer plan, by words in the message or by team workload. It replaces somebody distributing by hand.
