You can try a new shared inbox without migrating anything, provided your mail lives in Gmail or Outlook and the new tool reads from there. Connect the mailboxes, let the new tool read the history, and run both side by side for two weeks. Your current tool keeps working the whole time, and the decision is made on your own mail.
Days 1 and 2: connect Gmail or Outlook and let the new tool read history. Days 3 to 11: keep working in your current tool and compare each morning's view in both. Days 12 to 14: count what the new tool caught that the old one could not, and decide on that evidence.
Ask a team why they still use a shared inbox tool they complain about, and the answer is dread. Switching sounds like a migration, with export, import, broken history, retraining, and a week where nobody is sure which inbox is real. So teams stay, sometimes for years, paying a daily tax to avoid a one-time cost they have overestimated.
One fact defuses most of that dread. If your company runs on Google Workspace, your mail lives in Gmail, and Front, Hiver or Missive are layers over it. If it runs on Microsoft 365, the mail lives in Exchange and Outlook is the window onto it. Evaluating an alternative does not require moving anything. The way to decide is to run both on your real mail and compare mornings.
Can you try a new shared inbox without migrating?
Yes, with one condition. The new tool must read from your existing mailboxes instead of asking the mail to move into it. We build Sektra that way: it syncs two-way with Gmail and Outlook, and mail stays where it is. Gmail connects through Google sign-in and Outlook through Microsoft sign-in, so Sektra never sees those passwords. Access can be revoked from the Google or Microsoft account at any time. Your existing tool keeps working as before.
The Gmail path and the Outlook path
On Google Workspace, each teammate connects their Gmail account through Google sign-in. The sync runs both ways, so anyone who has not switched still sends and receives in Gmail as always, and what they do there shows up in Sektra.
On Microsoft 365, each teammate connects through Microsoft sign-in, and a shared mailbox connects as its own inbox, with categories, flags and read state in sync. The Outlook shared mailbox guide walks through it. Outlook shared mailbox vs a shared inbox tool covers where the free shared mailbox stops.
The two-week parallel run
Days 1 and 2: connect and let it read
Connect the team's mailboxes. Sektra spends its first hours reading history and assembling the relationship record: who your clients are, what has been promised, what is open, and the dated history of every thread. Set a watch, with a day count, on any account you worry about going quiet.
This is the first checkpoint, before any workflow comparison. Does the record match reality? Ask the assistant a few questions you already know the answers to, such as where do we stand with your biggest account, and judge it on those.
Days 3 to 11: compare mornings
Do not change how you work. Keep answering mail in your current tool. Each morning, have one or two people open both side by side and ask three questions.
What did my current tool tell me to care about, and what did the digest rank first, with what reasons? Did anything surface, such as a commitment coming due, an aging question, or an account gone quiet, that the current tool had no way to know? And when a client called, which tool got you call-ready faster?
Days 12 to 14: decide on evidence
Now the decision is concrete. Count the catches, meaning things Sektra surfaced that would otherwise have slipped. Weigh what you would give up. If you lean on routing rules, Sektra assigns by rule, round robin or workload, so test yours during the run. If you lean on SLA reporting, compare what the digest ranked against what the report showed, and read how the analytics are calculated.
Some teams switch outright and some run both for a while. Either way, decide on two weeks of your own evidence and treat every vendor's comparison table, including ours, as a starting point.
The questions to settle before you commit either way
- Data exit: if you leave, what happens to what the tool built? With Sektra, delete means delete, and the security overview spells out the details.
- Adoption cost: who on the team has to change their habits, and will they? A tool that syncs with Gmail and Outlook keeps the cost low, since anyone who has not switched still works in the mailbox they already open.
- The real workload: is your mail a queue, a book of relationships, or both? Two weeks of parallel running answers this better than any article, including this one.
- Where the current tool came from: the Front and Hiver pages cover what changes and what stays when a team moves from each. The Missive page covers the all-in-one case.
The tool you have was chosen for the team you were. A parallel run costs two weeks of light attention and settles whether it still fits the team you are. The founders page covers the small-team version of the same decision.
