Connecting your Email

SharedInbox provides a couple of ways to bring in your email depending on your type of email/your provider. You will find the link/button to do this in your SharedInbox dashboard.

The available options are:

1. Gmail/G Suite domains

This allows you send and receive mails from your @gmail.com emails or emails for domains managed using G Suite. Connection is done by standard email protocols (IMAP and SMTP) to pull and send your emails.

Please note that you will need to generate an app password for the connection. Details about generating an app password for Gmail is available here.

2. Yahoo

This allows you send and receive mails from your Yahoo emails. You provide your Yahoo email and password and we use this to connect to Yahoo via standard email protocols (IMAP and SMTP) to pull and send your emails.

Please note that will need to generate an app password for the connection. Details about how to generate an app password is available here.

3. Outlook/Microsoft 365

This allows you send and receive mails from your Outlook/Microsoft 365 emails. Like Gmail/G Suite domains, connection is done by directing you to Microsoft for verification and getting the necessary details to send and retrieve your emails.

4. Custom domain

If you have a custom domain like [email protected], you can connect this by providing your email username and password. We try to guess your mail servers and port but you can confirm this during the connection process. Connection is done using standard mail protocols (IMAP and SMTP) to pull and send your emails.

Please note that some providers may require you toggle a setting on their platform to allow IMAP access. Please confirm this with your provider to ensure you don’t have connection issues on SharedInbox. In some instance, we will be able to detect and show you the link to your provider to do this.

If you are connecting a G Suite domain/Gmail address, you may experience some authentication issues. (We recommend you use the Gmail/G Suite domain connection option). Google blocks access to IMAP for some clients. You can allow access and learn more here.

5. SharedInbox email

If non of this works for you, you can create an @in.sharedinbox.co email that you can use directly or setup forwarding to. The email will be connected to your preferred Slack channel. As an example, I can create an email called [email protected] and use it to send and receive emails in Slack. I can go a step further and setup forwarding of my existing email (say [email protected]) to it so that mails to [email protected] gets automatically forwarded to [email protected] and consequently to my selected Slack channel.

During setup, even though we recommend using the same SharedInbox email created as the send-as email, we allow you change this to any email you want. In my example case, changing the send-as email to [email protected] will also allow me send emails from Slack as [email protected]. Again we do not recommend this and this is because of delivery issues.

You see, there is an email authentication policy, called DMARC, designed to prevent email spoofing. It helps ensure emails are from who they say they are from. Remember, even though I have changed my send-as email to [email protected], the underlining sender is actually [email protected]. (SharedInbox doesn’t have the power to send as the real [email protected] because it wasn’t connected using the other options). In some cases, the ESP (Email Service Provider) will not allow this and will lead to failed delivery of your outgoing mails.

Our recommendation is if you won’t be using the @sharedinbox.co email as your send-as email, connect your email using the other options.