# Covering a small team's inbox

A small team gets the most out of Connect by treating each mailbox as a separate decision rather than switching the whole workspace on. Every mailbox carries its own role, signature, autonomy setting and health verdicts, and everything held for a person lands in one ranked queue with the approval recorded against whoever released it.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Channels:** email
- **In the app:** #/mailboxes, #/needs-you, #/autonomy, #/autonomy-audit
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/small-team-coverage/

## 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.

| Mailbox | Autonomy | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| General enquiries | `autonomous`, once Knowledge is real | High volume, low individual stakes, and the answers repeat |
| Sales | `ask_before_send` | Commercial terms are refused anyway; what is left still benefits from a human eye |
| Accounts or billing | `ask_before_send` or `off` | The cost of one wrong sentence is high and the volume is low |
| A shared personal alias | `draft_only` at first | Shows what Connect would say without anyone having to keep saying no |

> **Note** `draft_only` and `ask_before_send` look identical on the conversation screen and are not the same thing. The first never queues anything for approval; the second puts every reply in front of 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

### Can different colleagues have different permissions?

Approval requires permission to send on that channel, and the approval is recorded against the person who gave it. The finer-grained control most teams actually want is autonomy scope rather than user roles: hold one contact for a person, or one mailbox, rather than trying to express the rule as a permission.

### What happens if nobody works the queue for a day?

Held replies stay held and the recipients see nothing at all. Phone follow-ups are less forgiving: one more than 24 hours late is closed as `missed:` and never rung. The queue is ranked so that the first item somebody opens is the one that most needs opening.

### Does each person need their own mailbox connected?

No. Connect works on the mailboxes the workspace connects, and a shared enquiries address is the common case. A personal mailbox is worth connecting only when you want Connect acting on it, and its own autonomy setting means doing so does not change how the shared ones behave.

## Related

- [Email in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/email/)
- [What Connect may do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/)
- [Account and access](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/account/)
- [A row with no workspace stamp is invisible, not missing](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/invisible-not-missing/)
- [A high-volume inbox](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/high-volume-inbox/)
- [Running a business on your own](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/solo-operator/)
- [Human approval without blocking low-risk work](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/approval-without-blocking/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §1 — mailboxes, health and the three defects
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §5 — autonomy, Needs You, the audit trail
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §10 — sign-in and sessions
- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py)