A Collaborative Inbox is a Google Group with extra features turned on, so that members can take, assign and resolve the conversations sent to the group's address. It costs nothing beyond Google Workspace, it needs no software, and it is the closest thing Google offers to a shared mailbox.
This guide covers what it is, how to turn it on, how the assignment and resolution controls work, and where its limits sit. Every step and setting name below is from Google's help pages, checked in October 2026. We build Sektra, a shared inbox tool for Gmail and Outlook, and it appears once, in the section on moving on.
Open the group at groups.google.com, click Group settings, and under Enable additional Google Groups features select Collaborative Inbox. Turn Conversation history on under Posting policies and give members the Who can moderate metadata permission. They can then Take, Assign, Drop and Mark as complete. There are no internal notes, no sign that a teammate is already replying, and no reporting.
What is a Collaborative Inbox in Google Groups?
A Google Group is an address that delivers to a list of members. Collaborative Inbox adds a layer of state to each conversation in the Groups web interface: who it is assigned to, and whether it is resolved. The mail itself still arrives in each member's Gmail. The shared view, and every control described here, lives at groups.google.com.
Three things make up the feature. Assignment, through the Take, Assign and Drop buttons. Resolution, through Mark as complete, No action needed and Mark as duplicate. And shared labels, which any member can create and which are visible to everyone who can view the conversation.
It is a view over a group, so a few things a mailbox has are absent. There is no separate sign-in and no Sent folder of its own. Replies go out from a member's Gmail, and they appear from the group address only when that member has the Who can post as group permission.
How to turn on Collaborative Inbox
Step 1: the admin makes Groups available
If Google Groups is missing from a member's app menu, an administrator has to turn on Groups for Business. Once it is on, the Admin console path Apps, Google Workspace, Groups for Business holds the Creating groups setting. The options are Only organization admins can create groups, Anyone in the organization can create groups, and Anyone on the internet can create groups.
Step 2: create the group or pick an existing one
- At groups.google.com, click Create group.
- Enter a group name of up to 73 characters and a group email of up to 63 characters before the domain. The description is optional.
- Choose the privacy settings: Who can search for group, Who can join group, Who can view conversations, Who can post, and Who can view members. An address clients write to needs Who can post set to Anyone on the web.
- Add members with the role Group members, Group managers or Group owners. With Directly add members on, people join at once; off, they receive an invitation.
- Click Create group, then wait a few minutes before sending a test message. Google warns that an earlier message may not be delivered.
Step 3: turn on the Collaborative Inbox features
- Open the group and click Group settings in the left menu.
- Under Enable additional Google Groups features, select Collaborative Inbox.
- Under Posting policies, set Conversation history to On. When it is off, new posts are not included in the history, so there is nothing to assign.
- Set Who can moderate metadata to the people who will take, assign and mark conversations complete. Google describes this permission as covering all Collaborative Inbox features.
- Set Who can moderate content for the people who may mark a conversation No action needed or a duplicate. The same permission covers approving, deleting and locking messages.
- Set Who can post as group to the members who should reply from the group address. Click Save changes.
Step 4: shared labels, if you want them
In Group settings, under Shared labels, check Enable shared labels for this group. Any member can then create one: point to Labels in the left panel, click More, then Add label. To apply one, select the conversation and click Label in the upper right. Label names cannot contain spaces or characters such as the exclamation mark, at sign, hash, dollar, percent or ampersand.
How to assign and resolve conversations
Open the group and click a conversation, or check the box next to each poster's name to select several at once. Three buttons handle ownership.
- Take assigns the conversation to you.
- Assign asks for a group member's email address and an optional note, then Done. The assignee receives an automated email, and the note appears in its body.
- Drop unassigns it, with the option to assign it to someone else in the same step.
Three more buttons handle resolution. Mark as complete when the action items are finished. No action needed when nothing more should be done. Mark as duplicate when the conversation repeats an existing one; the duplicate is then locked, and a view conversation link leads to the original. To undo any of these, select the conversation again and unmark it.
To see only what is still open, click the down arrow in the search bar, choose Resolved status, then Is unresolved, and click Search. Use that filter instead of deleting resolved conversations, because deletion is permanent.
Where Collaborative Inbox stops
1. There are no internal notes
The only note the feature offers is the one typed into the Assign dialog, and it travels in the assignment email. The next person who opens the conversation in Groups does not see it. Context about a client, such as what was agreed on a call, has to go in a forward or a chat message, away from the thread.
2. Nothing warns that a teammate is already replying
Two members can open the same unresolved conversation in Gmail and both answer. Assignment protects against this only if everyone clicks Take before they start typing, and nobody does that under pressure. A shared inbox tool shows a typing indicator on the thread itself. Stopping double replies covers the conventions that help in the meantime.
3. There is no reporting
Google's documentation describes no count of open conversations, no response time and no per-member load. The Is unresolved filter is the whole dashboard. A manager who asks how long clients waited last month has nowhere to look.
4. Labels are flat text applied by hand
Shared labels cannot contain spaces, nothing applies them automatically, and they are separate from Gmail labels. A conversation labeled Billing in Groups shows no label in anyone's Gmail.
5. The work happens on two screens
Mail arrives in Gmail, state lives in Groups. Marking complete is a click in the Groups interface, and a reply sent from Gmail does not do it. Teams drift back to Gmail within weeks, and the Groups view stops being true.
Collaborative Inbox vs shared mailbox
The two get compared because each is the free shared address on its platform. A Microsoft 365 shared mailbox is created in the admin center under Teams and groups, Shared mailboxes, and needs no license up to 50 GB. Members get Full Access plus Send As or Send on Behalf. It has no assignment at all. The table puts the two beside a shared inbox tool.
| Collaborative Inbox | Microsoft 365 shared mailbox | Shared inbox tool | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the team works | groups.google.com, with mail in Gmail | Outlook, as an extra mailbox | The tool, synced with Gmail or Outlook |
| Assignment | Take, Assign, Drop by hand | None. Categories by convention | By hand or by rule |
| Resolution state | Complete, No action needed, Duplicate | None. Flags and folders by convention | Open, waiting, snoozed, done |
| Internal notes | No | No | Yes, on the thread |
| Typing indicator | No | No | Yes |
| Reporting | No | No | Response and resolution time per teammate and client |
| Cost | Included in Google Workspace | No license up to 50 GB | Per seat |
When to move on, and to what
Four signs appear in a predictable order. More than three people are replying from the group. A client gets two answers, or none. Nobody can say who answered a thread last week. Then someone asks how long replies take, and there is no number.
We build Sektra, and this is where it fits. Connect the Gmail mailbox that receives the group's mail, through Google sign-in so Sektra never sees the password, and the group becomes a shared inbox with per-teammate access. Each thread gets an owner, by hand or by round-robin rule, a state, and notes the client never sees. A typing indicator reads A teammate is typing a reply. Analytics report response time per teammate and per client.
Underneath sits the memory layer, a record per client of what was promised, what they asked that has no answer yet, and who is involved. A recruiting agency running candidates@ through a Google Group gets the queue and the record in one place. The Gmail integration page lists what syncs, and the product page describes the rest. The Google Workspace shared inbox guide compares all four routes if you want the wider view.
Hiver, Gmelius and Keeping add shared inboxes and notes in the Gmail interface, and Missive moves the team into its own app. None of them keeps a record of what each client was promised after the thread closes. The comparison pages set each one next to Sektra.
