Google groups Collaborative Inbox: pros, cons, and effective alternatives

As you’re reading this, chances are your inbox is overflowing with emails from customers, prospects, and your own team. Keeping up with all of those messages can feel pretty overwhelming—especially when you’re busy running a business. If you're sticking to traditional methods like sharing login details for a common inbox, it may seem easy at first. However, in reality, it opens the door for confusion, delays, and potential security risks for your business.

Let's take a sales team as an example, which manages multiple emails every day. They use a common inbox with a single shared login, but things aren't easy for them. Team members often use CCs and BCCs to keep others in the loop. This leads to an overwhelming number of emails in the inbox. It's difficult for other members to know what emails they've replied to and which ones are still awaiting a response.

The chances are high that important emails could get buried under this clutter, or worse, totally missed. The lack of proper email management not only negatively impacts the team’s efficiency, but affects their overall business operations.

What is the Google groups Collaborative Inbox?

To help solve this, multiple solutions were introduced to the email market, and one was the Google group Collaborative Inbox. It's a shared mailbox tool used by teams to simplify their email management efforts.

The idea is that team members no longer have to forward emails to one another or share the same email account. They can have a common space from which they can access and manage emails using their personal accounts. This shared email inbox can be accessed by group members once they're invited or added to the group.

To set up a Collaborative Inbox in Google, first you should create a Google group, and next configure the group’s settings (choose the group email address, enable additional Google group features, manage member permissions, and post policies). Then add or invite members to your Google group and add them as inbox members.

When a customer emails sales@yourcompanyname.com, it will be received in the Google groups Collaborative Inbox. Once received, you can assign it to a specific team member. When the issue's taken care of, just mark it as complete so that everyone knows it’s done.

Managing emails in a Google group Collaborative Inbox

Email assignment: You can assign an email to a team member or yourself to ensure that tasks are taken care of.

Mark as resolved: There is an option to mark a conversation as complete or no action required, to keep your inboxes clutter-free and avoid work repetition.

Mark duplicates: You can also mark a conversation as duplicate to ensure no replies are duplicated.

Label the emails: Easily label the conversations to organize them better. You can apply labels to messages regardless of their folders and status.

The advantages of using a Google group Collaborative Inbox for teams

Google groups Collaborative Inbox brings your team's emails to a centralized place so that everyone on the team can access the same set of conversations in the common shared space. This helps you avoid email forwarding or copying multiple recipients, making email management easier.

Enhanced accountability for teams

When emails are properly assigned to the group members, there's a lower chance of work being missed. Team members follow through their tasks with a higher sense of accountability.

Cost-effective solution

Since Google groups Collaborative Inbox is included with Google Workspace, there are no extra charges for teams already using it. Also, the Collaborative Inbox integrates smoothly with other Google apps like Drive, Docs, and Calendar to enhance your team's productivity.

The drawbacks of using a Google groups Collaborative Inbox for email management

The user interface is unfriendly

The Google groups Collaborative Inbox UI is totally different from Gmail or any other Google application. Your team may need to invest a large amount of time learning how to navigate it. Unlike Gmail’s intuitive design, the Collaborative Inbox UI can feel less user-friendly.

It lacks true collaboration

The absence of features like comments or internal discussions can be a real drawback for your business. Without these features, your teams may struggle to collaborate on important matters or share critical details. This also affects decision-making and slows down the communication process. Team members may find it hard to provide feedback or ask for clarification on other tasks or projects with each other.

No automation tools are available

One of the biggest advantages of using a shared inbox tool is how much time it saves by automation. These tools come with handy features that let you automate repetitive tasks, such as creating rules to assign customer conversations to the right team members or to send auto replies. Unfortunately, Google groups Collaborative Inbox doesn’t offer any automation options for managing your workflow.

No multichannel support for inboxes

Nowadays, most businesses use multiple channels to reach their customers. You can't connect every communication channel in Google's Collaborative Inbox. Except for email, it doesn't support other channels that your business is already using, such as business WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram.

You can't measure the team's performance

Knowing how individual members perform on your team helps you understand your overall team performance. You can assign tasks accordingly and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal. Inside Google groups Collaborative Inbox, you won’t get any reporting insights about your team or inboxes. That may not be a big deal at first, but as your team and organization grow, it can become a roadblock in the future.

Chances of work duplication are higher

In a Google group Collaborative Inbox, if an email is assigned to someone, no one else can see it—at least not until a reply is sent. In practice, when a customer sends an email to the team’s address, everyone receives it and they could reply to it if the assigned person hasn't yet responded. This will increase the chances of duplicate responses, wasted team time, and a bad impression for your customers.

It has limited features

It lacks some advanced features like setting up response time goals, audits, advanced anti-spam features, and third-party app integrations. This can be a real drawback because it may lead to cluttered inboxes, missed important emails, or a struggle to hash out details from other apps.

Why Google groups Collaborative Inbox may not work for your teams

Google group's Collaborative Inbox is a basic solution for teams who want a shared inbox tool without additional costs. However, it’s not built to handle every team’s unique communication needs. Because teams communicate based on their work and workflow, which differs for each one. Some teams keep things formal, while others are more casual. Some need quick responses, while others prefer accuracy and thoroughness over speed.

Let's say your customer support team manages multiple queries every day using Google groups Collaborative Inbox. But over time, they're facing several challenges. There's no clear way to assign tasks or track ownership. When an email gets assigned to a team member, others have no idea if it’s being handled until a reply is sent. This lack of visibility causes missed messages, duplicate responses, and confusion among the team members.

Handling complex queries is becoming even more difficult. Whenever a customer query arrives that needs input from other apps such as CRM, your team members have to switch to external apps or forward emails internally due to limited collaboration tools. They may have to copy and paste customer data here, which increases the risk of errors. There’s no way to automatically sort, categorize, or prioritize emails, so everything has to be done manually—consuming valuable time.

Frustrated with these inefficiencies, you may want to switch to a better shared inbox solution that improves overall response times, enhances team collaboration, and keeps everything on track.

Effective alternatives to Google groups Collaborative Inbox

1. Zoho TeamInbox

Zoho TeamInbox can help your team have a much better experience than Google’s Collaborative Inbox. Built for teamwork, it offers multichannel inboxes and collaborative features such as comments and internal discussion to streamline communication. It integrates with other apps, automation tools, and email management features that make it super easy for teams to work together without messy threads.

You can set up multiple channels for email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, and Instagram DMs with Zoho TeamInbox. The Starter plan starts at $5 /user/month (if billed yearly) and $6/user/month (if billed monthly).

2. Gmelius

Gmelius is an email collaboration tool for Gmail. It combines shared inboxes, project management, and automation features to create a centralized workspace. It has Kanban boards, automation tools, analytics tools, and it integrates with other apps. It is only compatible with Gmail, which limits its use for teams using other email services. 
The Lite plan starts at $10 /user/month (if billed yearly) and $15 per user per month (if billed monthly).

3. Missive

Missive is a team collaboration and shared inbox tool combining email, chat, and task management. It has features such as internal comments, third-party apps, analytics, and automation. 
Pricing starts at $14/per user/month for the Starter plan.

4. Help Scout

Help Scout is a shared inbox platform designed primarily for the customer support team. It allows you to manage emails, customer interactions, and support tickets in a centralized place. 
Pricing for the Standard plan starts at $50/month.

5. Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is a secure email service offering custom domain hosting and integrations with other Zoho apps. It supports features like email filtering, calendar, tasks, and file storage. 
The Mail Lite plan starts at just $1/user/month.