Every business has inboxes that belong to a job rather than a person: sales@, support@, accounts@, info@. The tempting shortcut is one account with a password everyone knows. The right tool is a shared mailbox, which costs nothing in Microsoft 365 and gives every person their own login to the same messages.
Why it is better
- Each person signs in as themselves, with their own MFA — no shared password to leak.
- You can see who replied to what; the audit trail survives.
- When someone leaves, you remove their access. Nothing else changes.
- It does not need a licence.
Setting it up so it works
- Decide who owns it. A shared inbox with no owner becomes a shared backlog.
- Use categories or folders to mark "being handled" so two people do not answer the same customer.
- Send as the mailbox when replying, so the customer sees sales@ rather than a personal address.
- Turn on an auto-reply that sets expectations ("we reply within one business day") and is actually true.
The leaver's mailbox
When a person leaves, convert their mailbox to a shared one rather than deleting it: the licence is freed, the mail history is kept, and a colleague can keep an eye on it for a few months. We do this as part of every off-boarding we handle — one of the small, tidy things that keeps a business from losing a customer thread nobody knew existed.
