There is an address that more than one person answers. It might be info@, support@, applications@ or bookings@. Right now it holds together because one person watches it and everyone else asks that person what is outstanding. That arrangement works until the person takes a week off, or until two people reply to the same message twenty minutes apart.
Google Workspace has no single feature called a shared inbox. It has four different mechanisms that get called one, and they are not variations on a theme. They differ in where the mail lives, who can see it, what gets recorded about each message, and what the arrangement costs. Picking the wrong one is the usual reason a team sets something up, uses it for a month, and quietly goes back to forwarding.
Four mechanisms, one name
The four options below are all in Google Workspace today. The differences that matter are in the last two columns.
| Option | Where the mail lives | What it records about a message | Extra cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain group address | Each member's own inbox, plus the group archive | Nothing beyond the message itself | None |
| Collaborative Inbox | The group, at groups.google.com | Assignee, plus complete, duplicate or no action needed | None |
| Delegated Gmail account | One real Gmail account, opened by others | Nothing, beyond who sent each reply | The account being delegated |
| A full user account for the address | Its own mailbox | Nothing beyond labels the team invents | One more user on the subscription |
A plain group is the default and the one most teams already have. Mail sent to the address is delivered to the members, and a copy stays in the group's archive. Nothing tracks who picked a message up, which is exactly the gap that sends people looking for something else.
The fourth option is worth pricing out before it gets dismissed. Google lists Workspace at $7 per user per month for Starter, $14 for Standard and $22 for Plus, and those plans can be bought for a maximum of 300 users. A dedicated account for an address is therefore a real line on the bill, and it still records nothing about who is handling what.
What a Collaborative Inbox actually records
A Collaborative Inbox is a setting on a group rather than a separate product. A group owner or manager turns it on under the group settings, in the section for enabling additional Google Groups features, and conversation history has to be on for it to work at all. Groups for Business also has to be switched on for the account, which is an administrator setting rather than something a team lead can do alone.
Once it is on, and once permissions are set, members can do four things that a plain group cannot. They can take a conversation they are volunteering to answer. They can assign a conversation to another member, or unassign and reassign it. They can mark a conversation complete, duplicate, or no action needed. And they can search conversations by assignee or by resolution status, with the search offering assigned to me, assigned to anyone, and not assigned.
The permission split is the part that catches people out. Taking, assigning, unassigning and marking complete all require the permission Google calls "Who can moderate metadata". Marking a conversation as a duplicate or as no action needed requires "Who can moderate content". A group where those permissions were never granted looks like a Collaborative Inbox and behaves like a plain group, and nothing on screen explains why the buttons do nothing.
One detail is genuinely useful. When a conversation is assigned to somebody, that person gets an automated email about it, and anything typed into the field for adding a note to the assignment email appears in the body of that message. It means an assignment can carry a sentence of context rather than arriving as a bare notification.
Where the Collaborative Inbox stops
The resolution states are a fixed set of three. Complete, duplicate, and no action needed cover the end of a conversation and nothing before it. There is no state for waiting on the customer, no state for waiting on a colleague, and no way to add one. For a queue where most items sit in the middle for days, the status field answers the least interesting question.
The work also happens at groups.google.com rather than in Gmail. Members who live in their inbox all day have to go somewhere else to see what is assigned to them, and the assignment notification arrives as one more email in the inbox they were trying to organise. Teams either accept the second window or drift back to answering from their own inbox, at which point the tracking stops being true.
Everything recorded is attached to a conversation, and the unit of a conversation is a thread. Nothing is recorded about the person. Two messages from the same customer six months apart are two unrelated conversations, and the only way to connect them is for somebody to remember. There are no fields either. If the queue is applications and every application needs an interview date and a decision, the Collaborative Inbox has nowhere to put either one, and that information ends up in a spreadsheet next to it.
Delegation, and the numbers Google publishes
For a queue that has to behave like a real mailbox, Google's own documentation points past Collaborative Inbox to delegated accounts, and it puts a range on the scale: inboxes shared among 40 to 1,000 users.
The published limits are specific enough to plan against. A work or school account can have up to 1,000 delegates, but with typical use around 40 of them can be in the account at the same time, and heavy use by a few or automated access through APIs and browser extensions brings that number down. A delegate invitation expires after a week if it is not accepted, and it can take up to 24 hours before a new delegate can actually get in.
The limit that ends the plan for most teams is the one about aliases. Delegation cannot be added to an alias or an alternate address, because an alias is not a Google Account. An address that exists only as an alias on somebody's mailbox cannot be delegated, so the address has to be a real account first, which brings back the licence cost from the table above.
Access is through the account switcher rather than a saved link. Google's documentation says not to bookmark a delegated inbox directly, because the access link can change, and to reach it from the profile picture menu instead. It sounds trivial until half the team has a dead bookmark and assumes the arrangement broke.
Delegates can read, send and delete mail. They cannot chat as the account or change its password, and when a delegate sends a message their own email address is shown. A list of features is unavailable inside a delegated account, including Smart Compose, Smart Reply, Gemini in Gmail, client side encryption, Chat in Gmail, adding attachments to Drive, and spelling and grammar checks. For a team whose speed depends on assistive drafting, working in a delegated account is slower than working in their own, and that difference shows up daily.
The case none of the four handles
All four options are built for mail that a person wrote. A large share of what arrives at info@ and applications@ is not that. It is a form submission, delivered as a notification email with the answers laid out in the body.
That difference matters more than it sounds. The answers are text in a message, so nothing can be filtered on them, nothing can be sorted by them, and nothing can be counted. Fifty applications become fifty emails that all look the same in a list, and the only way to see who has not been contacted is to open them one at a time. Mark a few complete and the list is tidier, but the question of how many arrived last month, how many were accepted, and how long the average reply took cannot be answered from a mailbox at all.
There is a second cost that shows up later. When the answers only exist inside message bodies, every downstream task becomes retyping. A shortlist gets retyped into a spreadsheet. A mail merge for the people who were accepted gets retyped again. A report for whoever asked for numbers gets counted by hand from a folder. None of those steps is difficult, and all of them have to be redone every time the queue runs, which is why the effort never falls even as the team gets better at answering.
This is the point where teams either add a spreadsheet beside the inbox or move the intake itself. A form tool with response management keeps the submission, the owner, the status and the reply on one record, so a filter answers the question instead of a person reading. The use cases that push teams there are usually applications, event sign ups and support intake, because all three have a middle state that lasts for days and fields that a mailbox cannot hold.
How to choose
Two questions settle it faster than a feature comparison. Does the address have to behave like a mailbox, with drafts, folders and a signature of its own, or does it only have to show who is handling what. And is what arrives written by a person, or generated by a form. The answers rule out two of the four options before anything is switched on.
If the address is answered by two or three people and the volume is low, a plain group with a clear rule about who answers on which days costs nothing and adds no second window. Tooling does not fix a rota problem.
If the problem is collisions and nobody knowing what is outstanding, turn on Collaborative Inbox, and grant both moderation permissions at the same time. Accept that the statuses only describe endings and that the work happens outside Gmail.
If the address needs to behave like a mailbox, with drafts, folders and mobile access, use delegation, and budget for the address to be a real account rather than an alias.
If what arrives is structured, and the questions are about throughput, the mailbox is the wrong container regardless of which of the three is chosen. What is needed is a record per submission with an owner and a status, and the way that looks in practice is closer to a list with columns than to an inbox.
What to change first
Before changing anything, count last month's arrivals at the address and sort them into replies to a person and submissions from a form. If the second pile is the larger one, turning on Collaborative Inbox will tidy a list without answering a single question the team actually has. Move the intake instead, and see it working on the demo before any address is pointed anywhere new. Halict prices that by the number of people answering rather than by the number of submissions.
Q1. Does Google Workspace have a shared mailbox like Microsoft 365 does?
Not under that name and not as a single feature. The closest equivalents are a Google Group with Collaborative Inbox features turned on, and a real Gmail account with delegates added. Which one fits depends on whether the address needs to behave like a mailbox, with drafts and folders, or only needs assignment and a resolution status.
Q2. Does a Collaborative Inbox cost extra?
No. It is a setting on a group, and Groups for Business has to be enabled for the account by an administrator. The cost appears only if the alternative route is taken and the address is created as a full user account, since Workspace is priced per user at $7, $14 or $22 per month depending on the plan.
Q3. Why can nobody on the team assign conversations after Collaborative Inbox was turned on?
Almost always the permissions. Taking, assigning and marking complete need the "Who can moderate metadata" permission, and marking a conversation as a duplicate or as no action needed needs "Who can moderate content". Turning the feature on does not grant either one, and conversation history also has to be on for the features to work.
Q4. How many people can share one Gmail inbox through delegation?
An account can have up to 1,000 delegates, and Google states that with typical use around 40 of them can be in the account at the same time. Above average use by a few delegates, or automated access through APIs and browser extensions, reduces how many can be in at once.
Q5. Can a Collaborative Inbox track anything other than assigned and resolved?
No. The states are complete, duplicate, and no action needed, and the set cannot be extended. A queue that needs a state for waiting on the customer, or fields such as an interview date or a decision, has to keep that information somewhere else, which in most teams means a spreadsheet kept alongside the group.