A team inbox is one mailbox your whole team sends and reads from, connected like any other mailbox and then promoted into that role. Every team can hold exactly one, and only the team's own broker can set it up.
When You'd Use This
Use this when a team wants one shared address for client mail (a general brokerage inbox, an admin line) rather than everyone sending from their own account. It's set up per team, so a brokerage with several teams can run several inboxes, one each, with no organization-wide shared mailbox connecting them.
What a Team Inbox Is
Connecting a mailbox always creates a personal one first, tied to you and nobody else. That's deliberate: a connect screen that could silently turn your own address into the team's send-from mailbox would be handing your inbox away without telling you. Promoting it is the one way to make that call, and only the team's broker - the person who owns that team, not admins generally - can do it.
Promote a Mailbox to the Team Inbox
Under Settings > Mailboxes, click Manage on a connected mailbox and look for Make This the Team Inbox. It confirms once, telling you what moves: the connection, synced messages, calendar, signature, and history all travel with it, leaving your own mailbox list.
Promoting a second mailbox swaps, and the outgoing one comes back to you
A team can hold only one live team inbox. Promoting a different mailbox swaps rather than adds: the current team inbox is demoted back to your own personal mailboxes, not to whoever originally connected or gave it up. Promotion clears the mailbox's owner entirely while it's the team's, so if ownership has changed hands since setup, the outgoing mailbox comes back to whoever owns the team now.
Choose Where Your Mail Leaves From
Once you have a mailbox of your own, Settings > Mailboxes shows a switch for Send From My Email by Default. Off, new mail goes out from the team inbox. On, it goes out from your own address instead. This only decides which address shows in the "from" field on a message you write.
Blind-Copy Your Principal Broker
If you aren't your organization's primary broker, a second switch appears alongside send-from: BCC My Principal Broker. Turn it on and every client email gets blind-copied to them automatically, useful for brokerages wanting oversight without CC'ing every thread.
Pick Which Mail You Are Looking At
The inbox and calendar carry a mailbox picker in the filter row once there's more than one to choose between: Everyone, Mine, or a teammate's mailbox you've been given visibility into. The unread badge follows whatever you've picked, so switching mailboxes and seeing the count change is expected. The choice is remembered per browser, so it stays put between Inbox and Calendar.
Common Gotchas
- Promotion requires email import already on for the mailbox; one connected with only calendar sync can't be promoted until email is turned on for it.
- A mailbox connected while acting inside a different team stays partitioned to it. Promoting it into this one is refused; reconnect under this team instead.
- The send-from switch is unrelated to sharing settings on Choose What Your Team Sees of Your Mailbox. Sending from your own address doesn't change who can read your mailbox.
What to Do Next
- Choose What Your Team Sees of Your Mailbox to set what changes for teammates once a mailbox is promoted.
- Connect Your Email if you haven't connected a mailbox to promote yet.
- Set Your Email Signature Per Inbox so the team inbox signs its own way.