How to manage lots of emails (from lots of shared inboxes)

If you want to know if a company is growing, maybe count their shared inboxes.

When Colin McCarthy started a support-engineering job for ad-services firm Essence in 2010, he said he was the first IT hire at the company—what was then one office and 60 people, he remembered. Over the next decade or so, the company grew to 22 offices, 3,000 people, and a few extra multi-user inboxes.

Shared inboxes like “support@” or “info@” allow multiple individuals to handle a group of topical messages. The setup also comes in handy when a person leaves a company and a replacement hire or a fellow team member needs to reference a “converted” mailbox to read previous messages.

But multiple inboxes, with multiple owners, can lead to a chaotic collection, especially when companies are expanding.

“It’s a byproduct of that rapid growth. You do get turnover. You do get a lot of new hires,” said McCarthy, now digital transformation director at Google partner and consulting firm Promevo. “As IT leaders, we need to have a good process for managing that access, and knowing who has access to that mailbox.”

We spoke with IT pros like McCarthy about how they handle a situation when there’s too much mail, too much sharing, and not enough caring.

Learning to share.

• While at Essence, McCarthy had employees request a shared inbox through a Google form, with an official statement of its purpose, “owner,” and users. Back then, he used gPanel, Promevo’s reporting and monitoring tool, to enforce access from a centralized platform.
• An exit-interview form, McCarthy said, included a question about the person’s shared-inbox access.
• Tools like a Mailbox Usage report in Microsoft’s Admin Center, or an email audit log in Google Workspace, allow admins to view inbox usage and access. McCarthy recommends a quarterly or annual review—a somewhat manual task, he said—to see which inboxes are active and should remain and which ones look inactive and can be suspended and possibly purged.

Amit Patel, SVP at Consulting Solutions, has seen the problem up-close—with his clients, and even in his own messages. “I’ve had inboxes, or at least access to inboxes, for a year-plus,” he admitted. “And I hadn’t even visited them for three months prior.”

Patel says converted mailboxes should last around six months, and suggested important messages, like those including proprietary or legal details, can be converted to a CRM system for longer retention.

Patel also recommends teams set an out-of-office message for a departing individual that designates the person responsible for follow-ups.

Moving on! While orgs may stay organized with arriving and departing employees, a tougher-to-track group within a company, according to McCarthy, are the “movers.”

“There’s a terrible problem of people moving from one team to another, but their [access] rights in their previous position are not being removed. So, that would be the security concern,” he said.

At Essence, which was later acquired by WPP, McCarthy said the company’s processes removed all access following a role change, but on a “piecemeal” basis.

“I’ve never come across an organization that has a good movers process,” he said.

Autopilot. To stay organized in the shared inbox, Patel has set up rules that send emails to folders based on marked keywords or senders. Microsoft Power Automate can initiate sends based on criteria like an email’s sender or subject line. Tools like Google Apps Script offer similar automatic categorizations.

McCarthy sees automation and a ticketing system, ultimately, as ways to improve inbox management.

“If you’re spending a lot of time managing shared mailboxes, then shared mailboxes aren’t the solution,” he said.