It’s Not You, It’s Your Inbox: When to Leave Gmail and Outlook Behind

Few phrases capture modern office frustration better than “per my last email.” Email is the one tool every team in every industry uses, and it’s the one tool everyone loves to complain about. In essence, it’s the great equalizer.

Email didn’t used to be that way. There was a time when there weren’t 358 unread messages, reply-alls, and passive-aggressive manager CCs waiting for you whenever you opened your inbox. There was just the information you needed to get your job done.

So how can you get back to the time when email was a useful tool and not a workplace punchline?

You’ve got to figure out what’s getting in the way. It’s hard enough with just your own email, but if your team is in charge of responding to email on behalf of your organization or department, the answer gets more complicated. Maybe it’s your procedures, maybe it’s your headcount, or maybe it’s something more obvious.

After all, if every joke, complaint, headache, and task points back to your inbox, maybe it’s not you — maybe it’s the tool.

Figuring out shared email management

You’ve probably developed a routine for managing your email. It might be annoying, but hey, it’s just part of being a grown-up with a job.

However, when you’re asked to manage a high volume of email on behalf of your team, your systems can break down under the pressure. Instead of wading through newsletters, meeting invites, and updates from management, you’re suddenly overwhelmed by messages from community members, customers, patients, or students, all with pressing issues that need to be resolved quickly.

You can handle these types of requests from your regular company email account, but what happens when an important client emails the whole team? Who’s supposed to respond? How will you know if someone already has? Sure, you can ask around or risk sending a duplicate response, but it’s not a terribly efficient (or professional) system.

That’s just one example of how things can go sideways. Emails get buried, urgent requests go missing, and people get sick or go on vacation. While it may be possible to piece it together, what you really need in these situations is the ability to share an account with the rest of your team.

The shared account approach to email management

Once companies reach the point where more than one person needs to be part of the response process, they usually just set up another free “team” email account (e.g., clientname@agency.com, admin@university.edu, mayorsoffice@city.gov, billing@healthcareprovider.com, support@companyname.com, etc.) and provide the credentials to whichever employees are responsible for email.

Sharing a regular email account can feel like a perfect solution. After all, messages aren’t getting stuck with one employee anymore, anyone can hop in to lend a hand, and, best of all, it’s free.

While a shared email account is a step up from one person and their inbox, it isn’t really a sustainable option for most teams. Instead of solving problems and reducing friction, shared accounts usually end up creating more work.

Still convinced you’ve got your email under control? Check out these common red flags that signal that your shared email account is actually making your job harder.

8 shared email account red flags  🚩🚩🚩

1. You’re missing messages

One of the first (and most alarming) signs that your email solution isn’t cutting it is that incoming messages are frequently slipping through the cracks. Maybe you lost them in a sea of junk mail. Maybe someone else read the email but never sent a response. There’s no way to know, and that’s a problem.

You may be able to look past an MIA conversation now and then, but when it starts to happen on the regular, it’s time to pay attention. Lost emails are not just an annoyance — it means that deadlines are being missed, clients, patients, or students feel ignored, and your team looks unreliable.

2. You over rely on CCs and email forwarding

Neither personal nor shared email accounts come with collaboration tools, which leads to employees CCing or forwarding messages every time they have a question about how to respond to a request. While this may seem like no big deal, it can often create confusion about who is supposed to respond and clutters the thread with a lot of unnecessary back and forth.

It can also blur the line between internal and external conversations. It’s easy to forget who is CCd and say something that you meant to keep private. At best, it’s embarrassing. At worst, it could jeopardize trust.

3. You can’t tell what’s urgent

Everyone thinks that their email is the most important one in your inbox, but obviously some issues are more pressing than others. If you’re hearing from a lot of unhappy people who are upset with your response time for urgent messages, you should pay attention.

A common reason this happens in a shared email account is due to poor organization. Sure, most email clients come with ways to label, tag, or file certain emails, but not often at the granularity a team needs to properly prioritize incoming emails. Without a way to flag what matters, urgent requests get buried under low-stakes updates, leading to late responses, unresolved issues, and bad experiences. 

You know what they say: “When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.”

4. Your team isn’t clear on ownership  

When people are told to monitor an email account, some will jump to the task while others will assume that their teammates are taking care of it. Both scenarios are bad because if too many people try to respond, your clients may wind up with multiple responses and conflicting information. But if no one thinks it’s their responsibility, those same clients might not get an answer at all.

Having some team members shoulder more of the responsibility than their peers can also lead to burnout and resentment. “Oh, I thought so-and-so got back to them…” is not a phrase you should be hearing from your team very often, and if you are, it’s a sign that you need an email solution with more structure.

5. You’re stuck on repeat

No matter your industry, chances are that you’re being asked the same questions multiple times a day. While this may seem like no big deal (hey, you know the answer, right?!), retyping the same answers to FAQs day in and day out drains both your team’s energy and time. There is also a greater chance that the replies will be inconsistent, which can be confusing and lead to miscommunications.

Sure, you could create templates in your email client or in a shared document, but each of those options come with their own limitations. If your team is struggling with the best way to manage FAQs, it might be time to look for a tool that was made to respond to common questions at scale. 

6. You’re always on the hunt for context

“I think the details are in another email — one sec.”

Information is often scattered across email chains, inboxes, documents, spreadsheets, CRMs, and industry-specific platforms, and it can take forever to piece together what’s going on. The longer it takes to find context, the slower and less consistent your responses become. If your calls, meetings, and client replies are filled with you promising to get back to people after you’ve dug through your inbox, you’ve outgrown your system.

7. You can’t measure what matters

If you manage a team that does most of their work via email, chances are you’ve been asked to account for their time and impact. Unfortunately, standard email clients have no way to measure individual or group performance. While you could put together your own spreadsheet, it won’t be able to help you when you’re put on the spot.

Advocating for your team and customers means knowing how long it takes for you to reply to emails, who sends the most replies, and which issues take up most of your time. Without reporting, you’re flying blind, and that makes it hard to effectively lead.

8. You’re unable to keep data safe

There is more information about your business and clientele online than there has ever been before, and it is vital that your team does everything it can to safeguard that data.

The biggest problem with shared email accounts is that they involve sharing a password, which is a huge security risk. This is a problem for any office, but if you’re an organization that deals with sensitive information or is operating under HIPAA or FERPA, this is the biggest red flag of all. 

Why Gmail and Outlook fall short for teams

Given what power houses Google and Microsoft are, you may be wondering how Gmail and Outlook could be throwing so many red flags. That’s totally fair, and we first want to point out that neither of these email clients are bad pieces of software. In fact, for individual email management, they’re great.

Gmail and Outlook are easy to customize, provide organizational features, sync with your calendar, offer automation and AI tools to speed things up, and they’re widely used so pretty much everyone can dive in without any training. However, when it comes to team email management, things fall apart because the software just wasn’t designed for collaboration.

There’s no way to tell who is working on what or to communicate across the team when you need someone’s help to resolve a request. It’s hard to find past emails, gather data on top issues, or, if you’re a manager, to get visibility into what your team is working on. It’s a problem, and Google and Microsoft know that their solutions fall short.

Outlook has tried to solve for it by adding the ability to create a shared email folder that multiple people can access, and Gmail introduced delegated account access as well as Google Collaborative Inbox. Collaborative Inbox lets you assign emails to team members and mark them as complete. These are definitely steps in the right direction, but if you’re operating at scale, they aren’t going to cut it.

You deserve a tool that meets your needs, not a patched together solution. Whether you’re handling sensitive information, tight timelines, or a high volume of requests, you need software that was designed for the job.

Collaborative email support software

Ditch the shared Gmail and switch to Help Scout’s industry-leading shared inbox. Collaborate easily for faster response times and happier customers.

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You’ve seen the signs; here’s what to look for next

If you’re ready for the next step, it’s time to look into shared inbox software. Shared inboxes let departments that receive and send a lot of email manage them as a team. As a bonus, they allow you to do it without all of the red flags that come with sharing a regular email account.

Here are some of the features that set shared inbox platforms apart from regular email clients:

• Assignments: Shared inboxes allow you to assign emails to specific employees or teams to create ownership and help with workload management.

• Email templates: You can use email template features to create pre-written responses to all of those FAQs that land in your inbox.

• Organizational features: With shared inboxes you can tag emails based on things like topic or department. There is also usually the ability to create special views so that your team can focus on a specific subset of messages.

• Collaboration tools: If you need help or want to loop someone in, it’s easy to tag a teammate into any email thread. You can also leave private notes that are only visible to your team and easily see who is viewing or responding to which email to prevent duplicate work.

• Contextual cues: Most tools allow you to see vital information like a sender’s name, company, contact info, and any other conversations they’ve had with your company right from the reply window so you’re never digging for context.

• Automation: Shared inbox tools provide automation capabilities to help lighten your load. The software can do things like tag and assign emails automatically.

• AI: If your team is interested in tapping into artificial intelligence, shared inboxes offer AI that can draft email replies, translate text, and summarize long email threads with a click of a button.

• Self-service options: If your team handles a lot of FAQs, most platforms offer the ability to create a knowledge base and chatbot to help people answer their own questions without having to reach out to your team.

• Reporting and analytics: Unlike Gmail and Outlook, all shared inbox tools have reporting features that can help you measure your productivity and performance.

• Security features: Shared inboxes allow every member of your team to log in with their own unique credentials and can often be configured to be HIPAA or FERPA compliant.

Not every tool will come with every feature, but no matter what you need, there is a tool out there that will enable your team to do their best work.

Find a tool that is right for you

So, should you ditch regular email for a shared inbox tool? It depends.

If only one or two people are handling incoming messages, there’s not much collaboration involved, and you don’t need any reporting to improve visibility, then sticking with Gmail and Outlook might make sense. They’re solid email clients, and if you’re not experiencing any red flags, don’t overthink it.

But if you are seeing signs that things aren’t as good as they could be — missing messages, crossed wires, and lots of confusion — then it’s time to try out a solution that was built for the job.

You’re never going to stop rolling your eyes when you read the dreaded “per my last email” line. But at least with a shared inbox, you’ll be able to find their last email fast.