The right way to handle a shared mailbox like info@ or billing@

Every small business has at least one of them: info@, billing@, support@, hello@. They were set up on day one, they get the mail that matters most — invoices, new customers, the accountant — and they are checked least, because they live in a browser tab nobody has open.

The usual fixes make it worse. Forwarding everything to your personal inbox mixes it in with everything else and makes replies come from the wrong address. Giving three people the password means three people each assume someone else has handled it.

Here's a model that works, and how it looks in Converge.

Treat the shared address as one of yours

The shared mailbox is just another account. Add it to Converge alongside your own addresses, give it a distinct colour — green for billing, say — and it appears in All inboxes with everything else. You see a new invoice the moment it arrives, in the same list as your own mail, with a green chip that tells you where it came from.

When you reply, Converge replies as the shared address, with its signature ("Northwind Billing", not your name), because that's the address the message was sent to. The customer sees a consistent identity; you never leak your personal address.

Need to see only that mailbox? Click it in the sidebar. Need everything? Click All inboxes.

Mark what needs an answer

A shared address is where "I'll deal with it later" goes to die. Converge has a simple answer: the Urgent folder. Press ! on a message (or tap the flame on the phone) and it joins Urgent, marked in red, across every address. Set a reminder to respond — in an hour, tomorrow morning, next week — and Converge notifies you when it's due; by text message too, if you opt in. Reply, and the reminder clears itself.

The accountant's question on Friday afternoon gets a reminder for Monday 9 a.m. and stops occupying your weekend.

Let the invoices file themselves

The best part of running billing@ through Converge is Documents and Files. Every PDF, spreadsheet or Word document that arrives at any of your addresses is collected into one library, with the sender, date, subject and the address it came to. Pictures and signature logos are left out.

Group the library by sender and billing@ becomes what it should have been all along: every supplier, every invoice, in order, without opening an email. Optionally, every document is also copied to a folder in your Google Drive or Dropbox, so your bookkeeper can work from there.

A note on several people sharing one address

Converge logins are personal, and that's deliberate: each person connects the shared mailbox to their own Converge, with their own reminders and their own view. IMAP keeps read/unread state in the mailbox itself, so when one of you reads a message, the others see it as read — a lightweight "someone's got this".

(True shared-inbox features — assigning conversations, internal notes — are the kind of thing the Converge Collective exists to vote on. If you want them, say so.)

Setting it up

1. Create a Converge login.
2. Add the shared address: type it and its password; Converge finds the servers. For a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 shared mailbox, sign in with the provider.
3. Set its name and signature — the business, not you — and pick a colour.
4. Open Documents and Files after the first sync and group by sender.

The tab you never had open is now part of the inbox you always do.