The support address works fine right up to the morning Google decides the sign-in looks unusual and asks for a code sent to a phone that belongs to somebody who left in March. Then it works for nobody, and the whole team is locked out of the same mailbox at the same time.
That is the shared-password route failing, and it is the most common way small teams end up running a team address in Gmail. There are three better ones. Gmail has no product called a shared inbox, but it has four separate mechanisms that produce something like one, and they are not variations on a theme. They carry completely different ceilings, three of the four depend on an administrator somewhere, and the newest one is still being rolled out.
This page covers all four: the real click paths, what each one caps out at according to Google's own documentation, the send-as step that every route needs and everybody forgets, and which situation each route actually fits.
The short version
- Four routes, not one: a shared login, delegation, a shared inbox created in the Admin console, or a Google Group with its queue feature switched on.
- Three of them lean on an admin. On Workspace, delegation has to be allowed for the whole domain before any user can grant it, the Admin console shared inbox is an admin job start to finish, and a Group needs Groups for Business switched on. On a personal
@gmail.comaccount there is no admin and delegation is yours to set up. - The shared password is the one to rule out, and Google says so in its own documentation.
- Delegation is capped at 10 delegates on a personal account and up to 1,000 on a work account, with Google recommending no more than about 40 people using one at the same time.
- Google now has an actual shared inbox in the Admin console, on Business Starter, Standard and Plus. It is being released in phases, so it may not be in yours yet.
- Whichever route you pick, nobody can reply from the shared address until they have added it individually under Gmail's Send mail as settings. That step is separate from every setup below.
The four ways to share a Gmail address
| Route | Who sets it up | Reply as the address? | Documented limits and conditions | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared login | Anyone holding the password | Yes, and every reply looks identical | No published limit, and Google advises against it | Nothing |
| Delegation | Each mailbox owner, once an admin allows it | Yes, with the delegate's address shown | 10 delegates personal, up to 1,000 on a work account, about 40 concurrent recommended | One person's mail that colleagues cover |
| Admin console shared inbox | A Workspace admin | Yes, with from and sent by both recorded | Business Starter, Standard and Plus, still rolling out in phases | An address that belongs to the team, not a person |
| Google Group with the queue on | A group owner or manager, once Groups for Business is on | Yes, after a per-person send-as setup | No member cap; the published limits are on message size and inbound rate | Threads that need an owner and a resolution state |
Two decisions sit next to this one. If you are still working out whether a mailbox is the right shape for this address at all, the difference between a mailing list and a mailbox a team works out of settles that first, and how shared inboxes work as a category is the guide above this page for the version of the problem that is not specific to Google. If the platform question is still open, the Outlook equivalent works on completely different mechanics.
The one route to rule out: a shared password
Handing three people the same login is the fastest way to get a team answering one address, which is why so many teams start there. Google's position on it is not ambiguous. Its guidance on account sharing opens with the flat statement that "Google Accounts are intended for use by only one person", and then names the two specific things that go wrong.
The first is thresholds. Several people working one account raises the chance of hitting an account limit, and the limits were sized for one person's behaviour.
The second is the failure this page opened with. When activity looks unusual, Google puts a login challenge in the way, and if whoever is sitting there cannot answer it, "the account might be temporarily locked for everyone". One person's inability to reach a verification code takes the support address offline for the whole team, usually on the day it is busiest.
There is a quieter problem underneath both. Two-step verification is per person by design: Google's security checklist for small businesses describes 2SV as requiring "something they know (such as a password) plus something they have (such as a physical key or access code)". A password four people know, protected by a code that reaches one phone, is not really a second factor at all, and it puts the whole team behind whoever happens to be holding that phone.
The other three routes all solve the same thing: everyone keeps their own account, their own password and their own 2SV, and access to the shared address is granted on top.
Delegation: the admin switch, then the per-person setup
Delegation lets named people open somebody else's mailbox from inside their own Gmail. It is the quickest of the three real routes and the one most small teams should try first.
Start with the admin setting, because it is why the option is sometimes missing. Delegation can be switched off for an entire domain, and a user staring at an Accounts tab with no "Grant access to your account" section is usually looking at an org policy rather than a bug. In the Admin console, Google's instructions for allowing mail delegation give the path as Menu > Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > User settings, then Mail delegation, then the checkbox worded "Let users delegate access to their mailbox to other users in the domain". Google notes that changes "can take up to 24 hours but typically happen more quickly", so do not judge the result five minutes later.
The same screen holds a setting worth deciding deliberately rather than inheriting: whether messages sent by a delegate show "the account owner and the delegate who sent the email" or "the account owner only". For a support address, showing both is almost always what you want, because it is the only record of who actually answered.
Then the per-person part. The owner of the mailbox does this, not the admin. In Gmail: Settings > See all settings > Accounts and Import > Grant access to your account > Add another account, then enter the colleague's address. Once they accept, the mailbox appears under their profile picture menu and opens in its own tab.
Three things about that handover trip people up, and Google documents all three. You have to verify your own identity before the option to add delegates appears at all. The invitation "expires after a week", so a colleague who was away when you sent it needs a fresh one rather than a reminder. And acceptance is not the finish line: "It can take up to 24 hours before a delegate can use your account." Between the admin setting and this, a delegation set up on Friday afternoon is a Monday-morning feature.
What a delegate can and cannot do
This is where delegation gets honest, and it is worth reading before you promise the team anything.
A delegate can, in Google's delegation documentation, "read, send, and delete emails in your account for you". They cannot chat as the account owner and they cannot change the password.
What surprises people is the list of features that quietly stops working inside a delegated mailbox. Google names Chat, Meet, Tasks, Smart Compose, Smart Reply, Gemini, Drive attachments, spell-check and autocorrect among them. For a team used to composing with those, a delegated mailbox feels noticeably more basic than their own.
Two more facts change how a rota works:
- The delegate's address is on record. "When a delegate sends a message from your account, their email address appears." That is good for accountability and it is not something you can turn off from the user side.
- Mobile is not settled yet. Google states that access to a delegated account in the Gmail app for Android, iPhone and iPad "is currently rolling out and may not be available to you yet". If your coverage plan involves someone answering from a phone at the weekend, test that before you build the rota around it.
How many people can share a delegated mailbox
The number that circulates for this is 25, and it does not appear in any Google documentation on Gmail delegation. What Google publishes is three different figures:
- A personal
@gmail.comaccount allows up to 10 delegates. - A work or school account allows up to 1,000 delegates, which the admin documentation restates as "A single Google account can support up to 1000 delegates".
- Concurrency is the one that actually bites: "With typical use, 40 delegates can access a Gmail account at the same time", and the admin page frames it as advice, saying "we recommend allowing a maximum of 40 concurrent users."
The 40 is a performance guideline rather than a hard cap, but note which direction it moves. Google adds that "Above-average use by one or more delegates might reduce this number", so heavy users push it down, not up. Either way no support team of six is close to it. It starts to matter the day somebody proposes giving a whole department read access to the sales address.
Google's shared inbox in the Admin console
Check for this one before you build anything else, because as of August 2026 it is still arriving and a lot of advice about Gmail shared addresses was written before it existed.
An admin can now create a mailbox that is not attached to a person. Google's documentation puts it plainly: "As a Google Workspace administrator, you can create a mailbox and grant access to it for users in your organization." It lives in the Admin console on the Home page, in the Users section, under Set up a shared email address.
The edition list Google gives is Business Starter, Business Standard and Business Plus. It says nothing either way about the Enterprise or Education editions, so if you are on one of those, the only reliable answer is to open the Users section and look.
The people you grant access to "can read, send, and delete messages" and can "view and add contacts to the shared inbox". The attribution is better than delegation's: "In each email sent from a shared inbox, you can review the shared inbox address (from) and the delegate who sent the email (sent by)". The customer sees the team address, and you keep a record of who sent it.
The honest caveat comes from Google itself: "Shared inbox is an admin feature that's being released in phases. If you don't see it in your Google Admin console yet, use delegated Gmail accounts instead." So check the Users section, and if the option is not there, do not go looking for a plan upgrade. Set up delegation and check again later.
One question the documentation does not answer: whether a mailbox created this way consumes a licence the way an ordinary user does. Google's page is silent on it, so if the seat count matters to your budget, confirm it against your own billing page rather than against anybody's article.
Where this beats delegation is ownership. A delegated mailbox belongs to a person, so it inherits their leaving date, their password reset and their name, whereas a mailbox created this way was never anybody's in the first place.
A Google Group with the queue switched on
The fourth route is a Google Group with Collaborative Inbox features enabled, which turns a broadcast address into something closer to a queue: each conversation gets an assignee and a resolution state, so you can see what is still open and who has it.
It beats delegation on one axis, and it happens to be the axis that starts mattering as a team grows: delegation gives several people access to the same pile of mail with nothing recording who is dealing with what, while a group with the queue on puts a named owner on a thread.
It also carries more setup than any other route here, and the settings that decide whether assignment works for anyone besides the person who created the group are not the settings you would expect to find. The full setup, the two permissions behind the assignment actions, and the limits Google publishes are covered separately and in detail, which is the better starting point if this is the route you want.
Replying as the shared address: the step everyone forgets
None of the four routes changes what a customer sees in the From line by itself. Every person who answers has to add the shared address to their own Gmail first, or their replies go out under their own name and the next message in the thread bypasses the team address entirely. When one does go out wrong, what you can and cannot unsend depends on how many seconds have passed.
Google's send-as procedure runs per person: Settings > See all settings > Accounts and import > Send mail as > Add another email address. Enter the name and address, click through to send the verification, then "Sign in to the account you added. Open the confirmation message you got from Gmail. Click the link."
That last instruction is the problem when the address is a group, because nobody signs in to a group. Google documents a separate procedure for that case, and it starts with a role requirement: it "requires the Owner or Manager role" in the group.
- In the group's settings, set Who can post to Anyone on the web. Turn on message moderation at the same time if you would rather the confirmation link did not reach every member.
- Run the send-as steps in Gmail as above. Gmail then "sends a confirmation code to the group" rather than to an inbox.
- Find it in the group's Conversations, or in Pending if you switched moderation on, and verify it there.
- Get rid of the confirmation message: reject it if moderation is on, otherwise delete it from Conversations.
- Put Who can post and Message moderation back to what they were. Google marks this step optional. It is not, unless you want an address anyone on the internet can post to.
One honest note while you are in this screen. Google has said that "Starting January 2027, Gmail will no longer support the 'Send as' feature for third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com." The carve-out on the same page matters as much as the change: "This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own." So a group address on your own domain is fine, and so is an old Gmail address you still answer from. What stops working is sending as a mailbox hosted by somebody other than Google.
Which route for which team
Start with what the address is rather than with how many people are on the team, because the first question sorts the routes and the second one does not.
One person's mail that colleagues cover. Delegation, without hesitating. A named mailbox with two or three people who can step in while the owner is away is exactly what it was built for, and the setup is a five-minute job for the person who owns the mailbox.
A team address that belongs to nobody in particular. Check the Admin console for the shared inbox option first, and use delegation as the fallback Google itself recommends. Both keep individual accounts and individual 2SV, but only the Admin console version survives the owner leaving without somebody having to reassign the mailbox first.
An address where threads need an owner and a status. A Group with the queue on. Once two people can both plausibly answer the same message, "who has this one" stops being answerable by looking at the inbox, and access alone will not tell you.
A rota that answers from phones. Test before you commit to it, since delegated access in the mobile apps is still rolling out and a coverage plan built on an assumption gets found out at the weekend.
More than a handful of people on one mailbox. Watch the concurrency recommendation rather than the delegate cap. If the number of people in that mailbox at 9am is climbing towards 40, you have a different problem than the one this page solves. The support team size calculator is a quicker way to check whether the rota still matches the volume arriving.
Before spending anything on any of it, the working practices a shared queue needs are free, and they fix a surprising share of the symptoms teams go shopping for.
What none of the Gmail routes give you
All four routes solve access. None of them solves the work. Five things stay missing no matter which one you pick:
- A reference number the customer can quote back at you, and that you can search for later.
- A clock on an open thread. Nothing in Gmail tells you this message has been sitting unanswered for nine hours, and nothing reports on it afterwards.
- Routing. Mail arrives and waits for a human to notice it and claim it. Nothing sends the billing questions to the person who handles billing.
- Live collision signals. A queue shows you an assignee after somebody assigns it. Nothing tells you a colleague is composing a reply to this message right now, which is the exact moment the duplicate gets created.
- Reporting. Volume, response time, who answered what: none of it exists natively, and the spreadsheet somebody volunteers to keep instead rarely survives the quarter.
If the reference number is the one you keep hitting, what actually changes when a message becomes a ticket is the honest version of that decision. If it is the first and fourth together, that is the point where a dedicated shared inbox tool such as TriageFlow starts paying for itself: an owner is on the message before anyone opens it, and the response clock runs where the whole team can see it.
Frequently asked questions
Can you have a shared inbox in Gmail?
Yes, in four different ways, none of which is a product called a shared inbox. You can delegate a mailbox to named colleagues, have an admin create a shared inbox in the Admin console, or run the address as a Google Group with its queue feature switched on. The fourth way, sharing one password, is the one to avoid.
Can multiple users use the same Gmail account?
Technically yes, and Google recommends against it in writing: "Google Accounts are intended for use by only one person." The practical risk is not philosophical. A login challenge that one person cannot resolve can lock the account for everybody sharing it, which takes the whole address down at once.
How many delegates can you have in Gmail?
Ten on a personal @gmail.com account, and up to 1,000 on a work or school account. The number that matters more is concurrency: Google says about 40 delegates can work in an account at the same time under typical use, and warns that above-average use by some of them pushes that figure down.
Is a Google Group a shared inbox?
Only once you switch the queue on. A plain group hands each message to every member and then forgets about it, which makes it a distribution list. Enabling Collaborative Inbox features adds an assignee and resolution states, and that is the point at which it starts behaving like a shared inbox rather than a mailing list.
Should I use a delegated account or a Collaborative Inbox?
Use a delegated account when the mail belongs to one person and colleagues cover it. Use a Google Group with Collaborative Inbox switched on when the address belongs to the team and threads need an owner. The switching point is usually the day someone asks "who is dealing with this one" and nobody can answer by looking at the inbox.
Is Gmail delegation secure?
More secure than the alternative it usually replaces. Nobody hands out a password, everyone keeps their own two-step verification, and the delegate's address is recorded on every message they send. What it does not give you is granular control: a delegate can delete mail as freely as they can read it.
Can I use a delegated account on my phone?
Maybe, and that is Google's own answer. Access to delegated accounts in the Gmail apps for Android, iPhone and iPad is described as rolling out and possibly not available yet. Check it on the actual devices your team uses before you rely on it for out-of-hours coverage.
Do I need Google Workspace for a shared inbox in Gmail?
For delegation, no: personal accounts support up to 10 delegates. For everything else, yes. The Admin console shared inbox needs Business Starter, Standard or Plus, and Google Groups with the queue feature needs Groups for Business switched on for your domain.
Bottom line
If you are on a shared password today, moving to delegation is an afternoon's work and removes an entire class of outage. If the address belongs to the team rather than to a person, look for the shared inbox option in the Admin console first, since it fixes the ownership problem delegation leaves behind. And once more than one person can plausibly answer the same message, the missing piece stops being access and starts being who has it, which is the point where a Group's queue, or something built for the job, earns its place.