Does a shared inbox in Google Workspace cost an extra licence?

It depends which of the four options you use. Email aliases and group addresses are free and do not count towards your user licences, provided you signed up with a verified domain, so a plain group and a Collaborative Inbox cost nothing. A real mailbox for support@ with delegation is a user account, so it is a licence on your invoice every month.

Why can customers not email our support@ group?

Almost always two settings in two places. An admin has to allow group owners to accept incoming email from outside the organization in the Groups for Business sharing settings, and then the group owner has to set Who can post to Anyone on the web. If that option is missing inside the group, the admin checkbox is the reason.

Google Workspace shared inbox: 4 options and how to pick

Q: Can several people answer the same address without sharing a password?

Yes. Gmail delegation gives named people access to a mailbox without the password. A delegate can read, send and delete messages for that account, but cannot chat as it or change its password. An admin has to switch mail delegation on first, under Apps, Google Workspace, Gmail, User settings.

Say a twelve-person agency puts info@ on its website, and one person answers it. Then that person takes a week off, a client question sits for nine days, and the agreed fix is to forward the address to three people. Now every message arrives three times, two people answer the same customer a minute apart, a third assumes somebody else has it, and nobody can say who replied to what last week.

This is the question we get most often once the mail itself works: how do you run a support@ or info@ address that more than one person is responsible for. Google Workspace gives you four ways. Three are free, they are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is how a shared address becomes the mess above.

What we check before picking anything

Six answers, before anyone opens the Admin console.

How many people actually answer the address, and how many work it at the same time.
Whether it has to accept mail from outside the organization. A customer-facing support@ does; an internal it-help@ often does not.
Whether the team will reply from the address or under their own names. That decides whether a deliverability job comes with it.
Whether anyone needs it on a phone.
Whether you need a record of who took which conversation, or whether "somebody answered it" is enough.
Whether the address already exists as a forward, an alias or an old mailbox still on the invoice. A dormant licence left behind by a departure is common enough that we look for it first, and the offboarding checklist covers how those get stranded.

Option one: an alias on somebody's mailbox

An alias is a second address on an existing user account. Google allows up to 30 per user at no extra cost, and the Workspace setup FAQ is explicit that aliases and group addresses are free and do not count towards your user licences, provided you signed up with a verified domain.

What an alias is not is a shared anything. Google's documentation says an alias can be assigned to only one person's account, and only that user can send and receive with it; its own advice for an address several people need is to use Gmail delegation instead.

So use an alias when one named person owns the address and the rest are cover. At a six-person shop, billing@ is usually one bookkeeper.

Option two: a plain Google Group

A group address drops a copy of every message into every member's own inbox. Free, no licence, up to 30 alias addresses per group, and some names are reserved, admin and postmaster among them.

This is what most small teams reach for, and it is what produces the duplicate reply: three members, three copies, no state anywhere. It is the right answer for an address nobody has to answer, such as an alerts feed or the mailbox your invoicing system posts to. It is the wrong answer for customers.

Option three: the same group as a Collaborative Inbox

Most teams do not know they already own this one, and for a customer queue on a tight budget it is usually the right answer. You switch Collaborative Inbox on in the group's settings, and conversation history has to be on too or none of the features appear.

What you get is a queue with state. A member can Take a conversation or Assign it by address, and the assignee gets an email carrying whatever note was typed into the assignment field. Drop removes an assignment regardless of who made it. When the work is done, Mark as complete; when there is nothing to do, No action needed; when somebody opened a second conversation about the same thing, Mark as duplicate, which locks it. Both have to be in the same group, and duplicates cannot be chained.

Permissions are the usual reason a button is missing. Taking, assigning and marking complete sit under "Who can moderate metadata"; marking duplicate and no-action-needed sit under "Who can moderate content". Grant both to the people answering, or they get a queue they can read and not work. Triage runs off the search dropdown, which filters by "Assigned to" and by resolved status. Filter resolved conversations out of view rather than deleting them, because deleting one is permanent.

The honest cost is the interface. The team works in Google Groups on the web, not in Gmail: no templates, none of the labels and filters they already live in, and a weak experience on a phone. Fine for two or three people handling a few messages a day. For a queue that is somebody's actual job it is friction they will route around within a month.

Option four: a real mailbox, with delegation

Here you create an actual user account for support@ and give the team access without handing out the password. In Gmail's own terms, a delegated account and a shared inbox are the same thing.

Delegation is off until an admin turns it on: Apps, Google Workspace, Gmail, User settings, Mail delegation, and the checkbox that lets users delegate access to other users in the domain. It can be scoped to an organizational unit, so you can enable it for the support team and nobody else.

A delegate can read, send and delete messages for that account, but cannot chat as it or change its password. The ceiling is 1,000 delegates on one account, and Google recommends no more than about 40 concurrent users before performance suffers. No small business will meet either number.

The Admin console also ships this as a packaged flow, and it converts an existing account too. From the Home page, under Users, Set up a shared email address creates the address and walks you through adding the people who will work it. Google's page flags one trap worth repeating: if you do not click Next, the users are added but not delegated access, so you end up with an address nobody can open. If your console does not offer the option, the delegation route above reaches the same place by hand.

On phones, Google announced delegated Gmail access from mobile devices on 30 June 2026, then updated that post to say the rollout had been paused and later resumed, reaching Rapid Release domains first. Google's post says it follows your existing delegation settings, with no separate admin switch. Test it on the real handsets before you promise phone access to anyone. The cost is a user account, which means a licence on the invoice every month: you are paying for Gmail itself instead of the Groups interface.

Which one we pick

One person owns it, others cover holidays: an alias, plus delegation on that mailbox if the cover has to be real rather than theoretical.
Internal routing nobody answers: a plain group.
Customer queue, two to six people, budget matters, no phone requirement: Collaborative Inbox.
Customer queue where answering is somebody's job, or the team lives on phones: a real mailbox with delegation, and accept the licence.

If the last two are a toss-up, start with the Collaborative Inbox: it costs nothing, and moving to a mailbox later migrates one address, not your mail system.

Letting the outside world write to it

A support@ group that customers cannot email is the failure we get called about most, and it takes two settings in two places.

The admin first: Apps, Google Workspace, Groups for Business, Sharing settings, and the checkbox that lets group owners allow incoming email from outside the organization. Then the group owner: Group settings, General, "Who can post", and choose Anyone on the web. If that choice is not in the list, the admin checkbox is the reason, every time.

The part teams get wrong: replying from the address

Receiving is the easy half. The first time a customer finds a reply from support@ in their spam folder, the shared inbox project becomes a deliverability project. Three things to know first.

Sending as a group address needs a verification round trip. Gmail mails a confirmation code to the group, so the group has to be able to receive it. Google's page says to set "Who can post" to Anyone on the web for the verification, and offers a tighter alternative: set message moderation to non-members or to all messages, so only members with moderation permission see the confirmation link. Delete the confirmation mail afterwards and put the posting setting back. If other systems also send on this domain, read the wider Send mail as and SMTP relay picture too.

A real mailbox has none of that. Replies come from a real account and authenticate like any other Workspace message, a quiet argument for option four when deliverability is already a sore point.

Groups rewrites the sender display, on purpose. When a message reaches a group from a domain publishing a quarantine or reject DMARC policy, Gmail shows the sender's name followed by "via" the group name, so the group's delivery does not trip the sender's own policy. That is the group working correctly, not a fault, and the recipient cannot switch it off. We covered what the via label means and when it is your problem separately.

Whichever option you chose, run one test before the address goes on the website. Send a message from it to a personal Gmail account and another to an Outlook address, then read the headers: the SPF result, the DKIM d= domain, and the Return-Path. If d= is not your domain, the alignment work belongs before the launch, not after the first complaint.

What we watch for the first month

Time on the oldest unresolved item, not the average. The average hides the nine-day one.
Conversations with no assignee at the end of the day. On a plain group that cannot be measured at all, which is the argument against it in one line.
Whether people reply from the shared address or quietly answer from their own. That habit decides whether the project worked.
Bounces and spam placement on the new sending address, which has no reputation of its own yet, and the licence count if you went with option four.

How Guanacos Tech helps

We set these up as part of Workspace work for small and mid-sized teams in North America and Latin America, usually alongside the deliverability side, because the two arrive together. We pick the option that matches how the team answers mail, wire the admin and group settings, prove the replies authenticate, and leave the owner two or three things to watch. How we work fits on one page. If you would rather have this done than researched, we are Google Workspace consultants, and half an hour settles which of the four fits your team.

Google Workspace shared inbox: the four ways to run support@, and the one we pick