Creating the address is the easy part
A shared contact address takes about ten minutes to set up. On Google Workspace, contact@ can be an alias of an existing account: Google allows up to 30 aliases per user at no extra cost. On Microsoft 365, an admin creates a shared mailbox from the admin center, no separate license needed. On a regular hosting provider, the control panel adds an address or a forward in a few clicks. This is the part every tutorial covers.
One line in Google’s own documentation deserves more attention than it gets: an alias can only serve one user. The moment several people need to read and reply, Google points you to a different mechanism, delegation. So even for the company that makes Gmail, creating the address and operating it as a team are two separate problems. The first one is solved in an admin panel. The second one is solved in how your team works, and it is the one that decides whether contact@ builds trust or keeps customers waiting.
Who actually replies to contact@?
Picture a three-person business. The address has existed for two years, and everyone checks it when they can: one person from a phone between jobs, another in the evening from the office. For a few weeks it holds. Then four classic failures settle in.
A message everyone can see belongs to no one. A request arrives, everyone sees it, and everyone assumes someone else is on it. On help forums the same worry comes up again and again: is anyone actually handling this request? The message quietly ages, and the customer either chases you or leaves.
“Read” does not mean “handled”. Behind an address checked by several people there is still only one mailbox. When one of you opens a message, it turns read for everybody. The person who opened it from the van between two jobs meant to come back to it that evening. Back at the office, it looks like a read email, so it gets filed as done, and the request never gets an answer.
The Sent folder becomes detective work. Before replying, you have to check that nobody already has. It is hard to know who answered without digging through sent mail, and that digging repeats ten times a day. The day two people skip the check at the same time, the customer gets two replies, sometimes with two different prices.
The context lives in WhatsApp. “Did you see the email from Mrs. Miller? I told her we’d come Thursday.” The information exists, but it lives in a private chat, separated from the message it belongs to. Three months later, nobody can reconstruct what was agreed, and the colleague who was off that day never knew.
None of these failures come from carelessness. They come from asking a mailbox designed for one person to serve three.
Three rules before any tool
The natural reflex is to look for software. That is premature: a tool enforces rules, it does not invent them. Three rules are enough, and they fit on a sticky note. We walk through them in our team email management method.
One front door. Everything about the business goes through the shared address. No forwarding to personal mailboxes, no customers writing directly to a colleague to speed things up. Every exception scatters the history and makes follow-up impossible to verify.
One owner per message. Not “everyone keeps an eye on it” but “this request is Julie’s”. The mechanics barely matter at first: a label with each person’s name, or simply saying it out loud. What matters is that at any moment, every waiting message has a name next to it.
A done state. A request is either open or closed, and that must be visible without rereading the thread. Otherwise the mailbox stays one long list where handled and unhandled look identical, and someone rereads everything every morning.
The tools, from simplest to most structured
The numbers below are verified on Google’s and Microsoft’s official documentation as of July 2026.
An alias on one person’s mailbox. If one person genuinely does the replying and the others only cover during holidays, an alias is enough. For many two-person businesses this is honestly the right answer. It stops being right the day two people reply every day.
Gmail delegation. It grants access to the mailbox without handing over the password: a delegate can read, send, and delete messages, but cannot change the password. A personal account accepts up to 10 delegates, a work or school account up to 1,000. It is the proper way to share a mailbox without sharing the password. But delegation shares access, not work: still no owner per message, still no done state.
A Google Group as a Collaborative Inbox. Included with Google Workspace, this is the first tool on the list that answers the ownership question: members can take a conversation, assign it to another member, and mark it complete. The trade-off: the work happens in the Google Groups interface, next to Gmail, and the assignment discipline rests entirely on the team.
A Microsoft 365 shared mailbox. If your licenses are with Microsoft, the shared mailbox is included: up to 50 GB without an extra license, each person signs in with their own account and sends as the shared address. Microsoft recommends blocking direct sign-in to the mailbox account, which removes the shared password. Its limits are documented too: a maximum of 25 users, and too many people accessing it at once causes connection failures or duplicated messages. Once again, access is solved and coordination is not.
A dedicated shared inbox. When several people reply every day, the three rules still need tooling: a visible owner per conversation, an open or done state, and internal notes attached to the request itself. That is exactly the scope of a shared inbox tool.
What Trupeo adds to the address you already have
Trupeo plugs into your existing address: Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, or any IMAP mailbox. Nothing to migrate, the address does not change. Each person signs in with their own account, and every conversation carries an owner, an open or done state, and internal notes the customer never sees. Each of the four failures above gets a visible answer inside the mailbox itself: who is handling the request, whether it is closed, who replied, and what was agreed with the customer.
If you are starting out, our complete shared inbox guide covers the ground from the beginning. On budget, pricing is flat and built for a small team, not billed per person.
Sources:
- Add or delete an alternate email address (email alias) (Google Workspace Help): up to 30 aliases per user at no extra cost, an alias serves a single user, and Google points to delegation when several people need one address.
- Delegate & collaborate on email (Gmail Help): what a delegate can do without knowing the password, and the limits of 10 delegates (personal account) and 1,000 (work or school account).
- Use a group as a Collaborative Inbox (Google Workspace Learning Center): assigning a conversation to a group member and marking it complete.
- About shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Learn): 50 GB without a separate license, blocking direct sign-in, the 25-user maximum, and the effects of simultaneous access.