Covering a small team's inbox

Mailboxes are the unit, not the workspace#

Several mailboxes per workspace, across Gmail, Microsoft Graph and any IMAP/SMTP server. Each has a role, a signature, its own autonomy and its own health verdicts. In autonomy terms a mailbox is an endpoint, and endpoint beats channel: the enquiries address can run autonomously while accounts holds everything for a person.

One queue, several people#

Needs You is the shared queue of decisions, approvals and operational problems, ranked rather than chronological. Anybody with permission to send on that channel can approve; the approval is recorded against the person, and the decision log answers 'who released this' months later — which is the question that actually gets asked.

• Entries drain by themselves as their cause clears, so an operational item that fixed itself does not need closing by hand.
• Voice line health escalates into the same queue, which is why a team that only handles mail still sees phone problems there.
• A rejection is recorded against the thread and the engine does not immediately redraft the same reply. If the reason should shape future replies, say so as guidance or as a memory — a rejection alone is a decision about one message, not a lesson.

The operational traps of a shared setup#

A connected mailbox that is not in the list

A row stamped with an empty workspace is invisible rather than missing: it matches no scope and no policy, so it drops out of every listing while by-id actions on it still work. Reconnecting the account would have written a second row for one real inbox. The listing and the uniqueness check both ask the one query that can see such rows now, and repair belongs to the boot-time migration rather than to a request.

A mailbox that authenticates and returns nothing

A quiet mailbox — a health signal rather than an error. Worth investigating before anybody concludes Connect stopped working.

Everything stopped at the same time

The daily allowance is spent. Work is held rather than dropped and the read cursor deliberately does not advance, so nothing is lost — but nothing moves either until the ledger resets.

Two people approving the same item

The approval is recorded once, against a person. The audit trail is the record of who, under which rule, with what outcome — including refusals.

Signing in, and who can do what#

Google OAuth is the only way in. There is no password login, which removes a category of shared-team problem — a password nobody rotates when somebody leaves — and rules out anyone who cannot use a Google account.

Signing in as somebody else ends the session it replaced on that browser, and only that one: a person other devices are untouched. On a shared machine that is the behaviour you want, and it is worth knowing before somebody assumes a global sign-out happened.

What a team costs#

The allowance is per workspace, not per person, so adding a colleague adds no consumption by itself; adding a mailbox that receives mail does. The practical brake on a small team is attention rather than budget: an ask_before_send mailbox nobody has time to work turns into an inbox with an extra step, and the customer waiting on it has received nothing.

Questions#

Related#

• Email in Connect
• What Connect may do
• Account and access
• A row with no workspace stamp is invisible, not missing
• A high-volume inbox
• Running a business on your own
• Human approval without blocking low-risk work