Ask HN: Shared email accounts?

[arihant]

I noticed our startup is using a lot of shared email accounts. We have shared Gmail accounts for dev@, support@, contact@. We basically just share the pw.

I doubt this is a one-off case and I think a lot of small businesses are using shared email accounts.

While sharing pw is not that big of an issue. The whole procedure of handling mails is a bit clunky. What tools do you guys use to make this more efficient?

I'm not looking for a CRM/helpdesk tool yet. We love Gmail, just want the email handling to be more efficient. The collaborative inbox in Google Apps is absolutely atrocious, partially because it has it's own non-Gmail UI.

[mcbetz]

I wish I knew of shared email providers where I do not need to share passwords.

For most cases using a simple CRM tool such as helpful.io or Helpscout for email only purposes has been enough for me, but there is one big disadvantage: you cannot send emails proactively, but just respond.

[arihant → mcbetz]

I think Office 365 offers shared outlook accounts for teams.

Our issues is not shared passwords, but the confusion that arises out of multiple people managing the same account.

You're right about CRM - even while replying to someone, it shows them that their email became some sort of ticket. That gives a bad taste of non personal response, bad for small business.

[dragonwriter → mcbetz]

You don't need to with Google, since Gmail supports delegated access to accounts.

[sjs382]

We use Zoho, which makes this easy. support@ and info@ are just "group" (or maybe another term) accounts that anyone with permission can send/receive email from.

[zhte415]

Sharing passwords is an issue. General example: Have an employee 'go bad' or want to make another employee look bad in a high profile way: Use email.

[alexobenauer]

Front was built for that use case: https://frontapp.com/