One address for the building, one password for everyone
The setup is almost always the same. A forty-unit condo association decides to self-manage instead of paying a management company, or a small strata scheme in Sydney never hires a strata manager in the first place. The newly elected treasurer or secretary creates a dedicated address, often a Gmail account like oakridgehoa@gmail.com, sometimes a plain mailbox that came with the building’s website hosting. The password goes into a spreadsheet, or a text message, and every board or committee member checks the mailbox from their own phone, in the evening, between work and dinner.
It works for a few months. Then the familiar problems arrive. Google locks the account because it sees logins from five devices in three suburbs. Nobody knows whether anyone answered the roofing contractor. And after the annual meeting, when a member steps down, the password they still know becomes a question nobody wants to raise.
This is not a niche situation, in the United States or in Australia. The Foundation for Community Association Research’s 2025 statistical review estimates about 373,000 community associations in the United States, home to 78.1 million residents, and puts self-managed associations at 30 to 40 percent of them: associations that may use professional help for specific projects, but employ no professional manager or management company. That is more than a hundred thousand associations where the volunteer board handles the building’s mail itself, with whatever tools it happens to have. In Australia, UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre counts 367,970 strata and community schemes in its Australasian Strata Insights 2024 report, revised in October 2025, and 68 percent of them have five lots or fewer. That report measures the size of schemes, not how they are run, and gives no count of self-managed ones. In New South Wales, the state government notes that most schemes employ a professional strata manager, and that there is no legal requirement to.
HOA board, condo board, strata committee: the same job
The words change with the country, and the job does not.
In the United States, a homeowners association or a condominium association is run by a board of directors that owners elect at the annual meeting. In Australia the words vary from one state to another. In New South Wales, all the owners in a strata scheme make up the owners corporation, previously called the body corporate, and it elects a strata committee of one to nine people at each annual general meeting to help it make decisions about the scheme. Queensland still says body corporate, and its body corporate elects a committee at each annual general meeting too. The secretary’s role, as the NSW government describes it, includes arranging meetings, preparing agendas and minutes, issuing notices, and “other administration including correspondence”.
Whatever the title, the pattern is identical: a handful of volunteer owners, elected for a limited time, answering for the whole building from one address.
What actually flows through the building’s mailbox
Over a year, the shared address of a self-managed association or strata scheme receives most of what makes the building run:
- dues, levies and special assessment questions, payment arrangements, and the delicate threads with owners who are behind;
- contractor quotes and project follow-up: landscaping, roofing, the lift or elevator contract, the gutters nobody has cleaned since spring;
- insurance claims and assessor or adjuster correspondence, often stretching across months;
- architectural review, renovation and by-law approval requests, and the approvals owners will point to years later;
- meeting notices, agendas and minutes, plus the questions and objections that follow them;
- requests from conveyancers, title and escrow companies during a sale, usually with a deadline attached;
- everyday owner messages: a leak, a noise complaint, a broken gate code.
Two things make this flow different from an ordinary contact inbox. First, the threads are long. A water damage claim can produce thirty messages over eight months, between the upstairs owner, the insurer, the plumber, and the assessor. Whoever picks up the file midway needs the full history, not a verbal summary in the car park.
Second, part of the content is confidential. An owner’s arrears and the details of a by-law breach are not the other neighbours’ business. They also should not end up in a committee member’s personal mailbox, where they will quietly remain after that member moves away.
A side question committees often ask at this point: should the address be a free Gmail account or a mailbox on the building’s own domain? A domain address like committee@harbourviewstrata.org looks more official and survives a change of email provider. But ownership matters more than the domain. A Gmail account whose recovery options belong to the committee, with its details recorded where the next committee will find them, is safer than a domain mailbox registered under a former member’s personal hosting account. Whatever you choose, decide who owns the account, the recovery email, and the phone number on file, and write it down.
Committees turn over, the mailbox stays
Committee and board composition is not stable, and it is not supposed to be. In NSW a new strata committee is elected at every AGM; in a US association, directors’ terms end, volunteers burn out, owners sell and move. A committee that looks settled in March can have two new faces by October.
Every turnover asks the mailbox two questions. Who loses access, and how? Who gains it, and with how much history? With a shared password, both answers are bad. The departing member knows the password until someone changes it, and changing it means redistributing the new one to everyone, usually by text. The arriving member gets instant, total access to years of correspondence, with no idea what has been handled and what is still waiting for an answer.
There is a worse case, and it is common: the mailbox effectively belongs to one person. The Gmail account was created by a former treasurer, with their mobile number as the recovery option. They sell their unit and move interstate. The address that every contractor, insurer, and conveyancer has on file becomes unreachable, and the committee starts rebuilding its records from nothing.
Why the shared password always breaks
Password sharing fails in three ways, and each one arrives sooner or later.
The first is technical. Gmail and Outlook treat simultaneous logins from different devices and locations as a sign of account theft, and both providers document it: Google blocks sign-in attempts “from a different location or device than normal”, and Microsoft blocks the sign-in and asks for a security code before it unlocks the account. That code usually goes to the recovery phone or email on file, which in practice means whoever created the account. If that person is unreachable, the building has no mailbox until they are. We walk through this mechanism in how to share a mailbox without sharing the password.
The second is accountability. When everyone acts under the same identity, nobody knows who did what. Someone told the roofer to go ahead, but who, and in which message? An email from the insurer was archived without a reply, but by whom? For a building run by volunteers, this is not a cosmetic problem. Committee decisions are supposed to leave a trail, and a mailbox where five people write as one person erases it.
The third is coordination. The read status of a message is shared: when one member opens an email on the bus, it shows as read for everyone else, who conclude it is being handled. That is exactly how a conveyancer’s request sits for ten days while three people saw it arrive.
The records outlive every committee
It is tempting to treat the email archive as a nice-to-have. For a building, it is closer to infrastructure. The renovation approval from 2019 settles a dispute in 2026. The claims correspondence explains why the insurance premium looks the way it does at renewal. The dated payment reminders matter if arrears ever reach a lawyer or a tribunal. And when a lot sells, the buyer’s side asks for documents on a clock.
All of that history belongs to the association or the owners corporation, not to whichever volunteer happens to hold the password. A committee that keeps its correspondence in one shared, transferable archive can hand a complete file to its successors. A committee that runs on forwarded copies in personal mailboxes cannot, because half of the record left with the people who wrote it.
There is also a transparency angle. Owners ask for records: the quote that justified a special levy, the insurer’s position on a claim, the approval an earlier committee gave for a balcony. A committee that can search one shared archive answers those requests in minutes. A committee that has to canvass former members’ personal mailboxes answers late, incompletely, or not at all, and every incomplete answer feeds the suspicion that makes volunteer committee work miserable.
This is the real standard to hold your mailbox to: could a brand-new committee, elected next month, pick up every open file without calling the old one?
Three operating rules, before any tool
Whatever software you use, a mailbox run by several volunteers needs three rules. They cost nothing and solve half the problem on their own.
One front door. Everything building-related goes through the shared address. If an owner writes to a member’s personal email, the reply comes from the shared address, or the message gets forwarded there before anyone acts on it. The opposite habit, forwarding messages from the shared box to personal mailboxes “so people actually see them”, destroys the archive: the reply goes out from a personal account and exists nowhere else.
One owner per topic. The roof project is Dana’s. The lot 12 leak is Miguel’s. The rule applies message by message too: every incoming email has one named owner, even when the answer gets discussed by the whole committee. Without this, everyone assumes someone else is on it, and the most important message is the one that waits.
A done state that tells the truth. A building’s mailbox accumulates dozens of parallel open threads. You need to see at a glance what is finished and what still needs action, and to note context as you go: “quote approved at the March meeting, waiting on the invoice”, “insurer nudged on the 3rd, follow up in two weeks”. If that context lives in one person’s head or in a group chat, it evaporates at the next election.
A twenty-minute weekly review
Rules decay without a rhythm. The committees that keep their mailbox healthy do one short review a week, often just before their regular call. One person opens the shared address and walks the open threads out loud: what came in, who owns it, what has been waiting more than a week. Anything without an owner gets one on the spot. Anything finished gets marked done.
Twenty minutes is usually enough, because the point is not to answer messages during the review. The point is to make sure nothing is ownerless and nothing is silently stuck. The review also spreads knowledge: the whole committee hears that the lift quote arrived and that the assessor went quiet, so no single volunteer becomes the only person who knows the state of the building’s files. When that person is the one who leaves after the next election, this difference is what saves you.
Keep the address, drop the shared password
You can enforce those rules through discipline in any mailbox. A shared inbox tool enforces them by design, and this is exactly the use case Trupeo was built for.
The principle: the building keeps its existing address. Trupeo connects to the current mailbox, whether that is Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, or any plain IMAP mailbox. The IMAP point matters more here than almost anywhere else, because many building addresses are ordinary IMAP boxes that came with the website hosting or a local internet provider. They connect like any other mailbox, with no migration and no change of address.
Each committee or board member then signs in with their own login, and the mailbox password is no longer shared. If it has been passed around, change it once, just before you connect the mailbox. When someone leaves after the annual meeting, you remove their access; the address, the history, and every open file stay where they are. When someone joins, they get their own access and inherit everything: last year’s claim, the three roofing quotes, the last payment reminder and its date.
The same mailbox carries the confidential threads, such as an owner’s arrears or the details of a by-law breach. Before you connect it, read our security page. It sets out who can get in, where the mail is kept, and who reviewed Trupeo’s security.
Day to day, every conversation has a visible owner, a to-handle or done status, and internal notes that owners never see: “spoke with the assessor, report expected end of month”. The question “did anyone answer the conveyancer?” is answered on the conversation itself, not in a group chat with eleven participants.
Two limits worth knowing. Trupeo does not change who owns the email account: if the building’s Gmail effectively belongs to a former member, it still does, and the ownership decisions above still need making. And Trupeo does no accounting, no by-law or violation tracking, no owner portal. It is the mail layer, which is the layer most self-managed buildings are missing.
Trupeo charges per mailbox, and the price stops rising at three people: €10 a month excluding VAT for a mailbox shared by two people, €20 from three, whether the committee has three members or nine. The details are on our page for strata committees and HOA boards and on the pricing page. To set that against tools that charge per user, we priced a team of 3, 7 and 10 in shared inbox pricing, per user or per mailbox.
Plan the handover before the next annual meeting
The best time to get off the shared password is a quiet month, not the week after the election. Check who holds the account and its recovery options, name an owner for every open file, and write down what is pending: open claims, quotes waiting on a vote, reminders to follow up. We cover the building-specific steps in handing over the HOA or strata mailbox, and the general playbook for any volunteer team in handing over a mailbox between volunteers.
A volunteer committee changes hands by design: a seat is a term, not a possession. The mailbox should be built the same way. The address and the archive belong to the building’s owners. The access follows the terms.
Frequently asked questions
Does a self-managed strata committee need a shared mailbox?
It needs one address that belongs to the owners corporation rather than to a member, and a way for several members to work it without sharing a password. In NSW there is no legal requirement to employ a strata manager, so in a self-managed scheme the committee handles the building’s correspondence itself, and the secretary’s role explicitly includes correspondence.
Should an HOA or strata email be a Gmail account or a domain address?
Either works. A domain address looks more official and survives a change of provider. What matters more is ownership: the recovery email, the phone number and, for a domain, the hosting account should be controlled by the committee and recorded where the next committee will find them.
What happens to the HOA email when a board member leaves?
With a shared password, the member keeps access until someone changes it, and if they created the account, its recovery options may still be theirs. With one login per person, you remove that member’s access and the address, history and open files stay with the building.
How common are self-managed HOAs and small strata schemes?
In the United States, the Foundation for Community Association Research puts self-managed associations at 30 to 40 percent of about 373,000 community associations in 2025. For Australia, UNSW City Futures’ Australasian Strata Insights report gives no such figure: it counts 367,970 strata and community schemes, and the 68 percent of them with five lots or fewer is a measure of size, not of how they are managed. In NSW, the state government notes that most schemes employ a strata manager, although no law requires one.
Sources:
- 2025 U.S. National and State Statistical Review (Foundation for Community Association Research): about 373,000 U.S. community associations in 2025, home to 78.1 million residents, of which 30 to 40 percent are self-managed, meaning they may use professional assistance for specific projects but employ no professional manager or management company.
- Australasian Strata Insights 2024, revised October 2025 (City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney): 367,970 strata and community schemes in Australia, 68 percent of them with five lots or fewer; the report counts schemes by size and gives no count of self-managed schemes.
- Who’s who in strata (NSW Government): no legal requirement to employ a professional strata manager, although most schemes have one, the owners corporation made up of all the owners and previously called a body corporate, a strata committee of one to nine people elected at each AGM, and a secretary whose administration includes correspondence.
- Committee’s role (Queensland Government): the body corporate must elect a committee at each annual general meeting, for bodies corporate under the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, which covers most of them.
- ‘Suspicious sign in prevented’ email (Google Account Help): Google blocks sign-in attempts on unusual activity, such as a sign-in from a different location or device than normal.
- What happens if there’s an unusual sign-in to your account (Microsoft Support): Microsoft may block a sign-in from a new device or location and unlocks the account after a security code sent to a recovery contact is entered.