Google Workspace Has the Pieces for a Shared Inbox, Why No Solution, Google?

Google Workspace has had all the primitives needed for a proper shared inbox for years... labels, filters, threads, Drive, permissions, Groups,... Everything you’d expect as the foundation for a collaborative support workflow already exists.

But for some reason, Google has never shipped an actual shared inbox product that ties these pieces together.

Most teams I know end up with the same workaround: forward emails out of Gmail into yet another vendor. And with each hop, another third party gains access to customer data. It’s a strange situation, considering Workspace is supposed to be the communication core for companies.

Recently Google “announced” a shared inbox feature, but after digging into it, it looks like the same mailbox delegation system that has been around for years, simply repackaged as something new. Google does this surprisingly often.

What’s frustrating is the announcement itself, and the fact that Google has already built 95% of what’s needed for a real shared inbox. The last 5%, the part that would make it coherent and genuinely useful, never seems to arrive (like with other use cases).

That’s why we don’t really use Google Workspace to get actual team work done. All the pieces exist, but they’re not connected into anything that supports real collaboration or aligns with how modern teams actually work.

I’m not sure what the product philosophy behind Workspace is these days, but from the outside it feels increasingly disconnected from how teams actually work, and often seems to be trying to catch up in the wrong way, rather than being innovative. Has Google lost the plot here?