Use case
Shared business inbox
Route customer enquiries to a distribution list so two, three, or five people see them in real time — without anyone sharing inbox passwords.
Best for
Co-founders, business partners, and small teams who all want to see customer enquiries without one person being the bottleneck.
The workflow
How it runs end to end
- 01 Create a shared address (e.g. hello@yourbusiness.co.uk)
- 02 Configure routing to all relevant team members' inboxes
- 03 Whoever has capacity replies first; others see the thread for context
- 04 Add or remove recipients as the team changes
- 05 Pause routing if someone's on leave, then re-enable
The “did you reply to that one?” problem
Every two-person business eventually hits the same friction. A customer enquiry arrives at one founder’s inbox; the other founder doesn’t see it; either it gets answered twice, or not at all, or with one founder unaware of what the other has committed to.
The conventional fix is a productivity-suite “shared mailbox” — fine in principle, expensive in practice for a two-person operation, and overkill for what you actually need.
A simpler shared inbox
Incognifi’s routing turns any alias into a shared inbox: one address (hello@yourbusiness.co.uk) that delivers each message to everyone on the routing list, simultaneously, in their own normal email client.
- No shared passwords. Everyone reads in their own inbox, with their own credentials.
- No shared mail client. No need for everyone to learn a “shared mailbox” UI.
- Replies from the alias. When you reply, it appears to come from the shared address — so the customer sees a coherent business identity, not the personal email of whoever happened to answer first.
What this scales to
The same pattern serves:
- Two co-founders wanting equal sight of every enquiry.
- A founder + bookkeeper. Customer messages to one inbox, accountancy mail to a different alias that only goes to the bookkeeper.
- A small team of five or six with a customer-enquiry rota, where everyone sees enquiries but specific people own follow-up.
- A business with separate functions.
quotes@,support@,billing@, each routing to a different (overlapping) subset of the team.
When you outgrow it
If your team gets large enough to need a proper helpdesk product, this setup transitions cleanly — your customers know hello@yourbusiness.co.uk, the helpdesk takes that address as its inbound, and nothing on the customer side has to change. Until then, you avoid paying for a helpdesk you don’t yet need.