How to Set Up a Shared Inbox in Front (2026): Step-by-Step

Before you start: inbox vs channel

The single idea that makes Front click is that an inbox and a channel are two different things. A shared inbox is the organizational space your team works out of — the folder in the sidebar. A channel is a source of messages — a Gmail address, an Office 365 shared mailbox, an SMS number, a chat widget — that feeds conversations into that inbox. One shared inbox can have several channels flowing into it, which is how a support team keeps email, SMS, and social in a single place. You create the inbox first, then connect one or more channels to it. Keeping the two straight now saves confusion later; the full model is laid out in Front shared inbox explained.

One prerequisite: you need to be a Front administrator. Per Front's guide to adding and using shared inboxes, only an admin can create a shared inbox, edit its settings, or change teammate access. If you don't have admin rights, ask whoever owns your Front account to grant them or to do the setup with you.

Step 1: Create the shared inbox

Front's onboarding walks you through the create-inbox form. The fields are simple, but two of them (Access and Ticketing) decide behaviour you'll live with for a long time.

1. Click the gear icon (settings) and select the workspace you want the inbox to live in.
2. In the left menu, click Inboxes, then click Create shared inbox.
3. Enter an inbox name. This is what displays in everyone's sidebar and in menus, so make it obvious — Billing & Refunds, Support, Sales — not a codename.
4. Pick a color. Purely a visual identifier, but a distinct color per inbox makes a crowded sidebar readable at a glance.
5. Set Access. This is the one to slow down on: choosing your workspace name makes the inbox public to everyone in the workspace, while Restricted limits it to specific teammates or teammate groups you name. A billing or HR inbox almost always wants Restricted; a general support inbox is usually fine public.
6. Decide Show in teammate sidebars — toggle this on to automatically add the inbox to teammates' sidebars so they don't have to find and pin it themselves.
7. Leave Ticketing on (it's enabled by default). This gives every conversation a status and a ticket ID; the ID prefix auto-populates from the first three alphabetic letters of the inbox name (so Billing & Refunds becomes something like BIL-1024). Handy for referencing a conversation in Slack or on a call.

Click Create, and Front drops you straight into the inbox's settings — which is exactly where you connect a channel next.

Step 2: Connect an email channel

An empty inbox does nothing until a channel feeds it. Most teams start with email. Front supports connecting email a few different ways, and the right one depends on where your mail actually lives.

1. In the left menu, click Channels, then click Connect channel.
2. Choose the provider that matches your setup from the channels menu.

The three email paths, and when to use each:

For Office 365 shared mailboxes, Front's Exchange Online setup guide is specific about permissions: the person connecting it must be a Front admin and have Full Mailbox Permissions on that mailbox — Read and manage, Send as, and Send on behalf — configured in the Exchange admin center. If sending fails after connecting, missing "Send as" permission is the usual culprit. The shared-mailbox channel is available on all Front plans (the Starter plan specifically supports email as its channel type).

For everything else — a legacy provider, a catch-all address, or a setup where you'd rather route mail in than hand Front direct mailbox access — use "Other email account." This creates a forwarding (SMTP) inbox: you point your provider's forwarding or advanced mail routing at the Front address Front gives you. Front documents this pattern for Google Workspace advanced mail routing, where you redirect organization mail to Front's SMTP inbox rather than connecting the mailbox directly. It's the most flexible option and the fallback when native OAuth isn't an option.

One channel setting worth checking while you're here: in the channel's Routing section you confirm the default inbox that channel's messages land in — make sure it points at the shared inbox you just created, not an individual one.

Step 3: Add teammates and set permissions

If you set Access to your workspace name in Step 1, everyone in the workspace already has the inbox. If you chose Restricted, you grant access now.

1. Open the inbox's settings and go to the Teammates (access) area.
2. Add individual teammates or teammate groups — groups are the sane choice for anything that changes as people join and leave, so you manage membership in one place instead of per-inbox.
3. Confirm sidebar visibility: an admin can push the inbox into all assigned teammates' sidebars from the Settings tab so nobody has to go hunting for it.

A note on roles: creating and editing shared inboxes, and changing who has access, is admin-only. Regular teammates can work in the inbox — read, reply, assign, comment — but they can't change its configuration. That's deliberate: shared inboxes are shared infrastructure, so their wiring stays with admins.

Step 4: Write your first routing rule

A brand-new shared inbox works the moment mail flows in — teammates can already reply and assign. But the payoff of a shared inbox is automation: tagging, routing, and assigning conversations the instant they arrive so nobody triages by hand. That's what rules do.

A simple, high-value first rule: auto-assign incoming conversations round-robin so work is spread evenly instead of the fastest reader grabbing everything.

1. Go to Workspace settings → Rules and macros and create a new rule.
2. Set the trigger (When): an inbound message is received.
3. Set the condition (If): conversation is in → your new shared inbox (and, optionally, narrow it — subject contains "refund", or from a specific domain).
4. Set the action (Then): assign to your teammate group using round robin — or add a tag, or reply with a template, or several at once.
5. Save, and send a test email to confirm it fires the way you expect.

That's the whole model: When → If → Then. Every automation in Front, from a one-line auto-tag to a multi-step escalation, is that same sentence. The full breakdown — rule scopes, ordering, and the "stop processing other rules" switch — is in Front rules explained.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Front's shared inbox is genuinely good at the job it's built for: consolidating channels, giving a team one place to collaborate, and moving conversations around deterministically with rules. For most of setup, there's nothing gated and nothing to work around.

A few honest edges worth knowing before you scale:

• Rules are capped by plan. Workspace rules run roughly 10 on Starter and 20 on Professional, with Enterprise unlimited. A busy team automating aggressively can hit that ceiling sooner than expected; Front's pricing tiers show exactly what unlocks where.
• Rules match patterns, not meaning. A rule can route subject contains "refund" to the billing inbox, but it can't read "I was double-charged and want my money back," recognize it as a refund, check the customer's actual invoice, and write the answer. A template reply is the same fixed text for everyone who trips the trigger.
• The inbox routes; it doesn't resolve. Getting the right conversation to the right team is the shared inbox's whole value — but someone still has to read each one and reply.

That last seam is exactly where an AI agent layer fits — not to replace the shared inbox, but to do the reasoning-heavy part a keyword rule structurally can't. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists for precisely this work. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Front you already use through the live Macha–Front connector — it does not replace Front, your shared inbox, or your rules. You keep your inbox and rules doing what they're good at: getting the right conversation to the right place with the right tags. Then Macha's agent reads that conversation, understands intent rather than keywords, and drafts or sends a grounded reply — pulling a real order or account status through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something the agent can call. If you want the mechanics, connecting Front to Macha to route conversations to AI walks through it, and Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution — automation and reasoning have different costs, and it's honest to price them that way.

The clean division of labour: let the Front shared inbox be the deterministic place work lives, and layer an agent on top for the part a pattern-match can't do — reading the conversation and answering it well.

FAQ

Who can create a shared inbox in Front? Only a Front administrator. Any admin can create a shared inbox, edit its settings, and change teammate access. Regular teammates can work in a shared inbox — reply, assign, comment — but can't change its configuration.

What's the difference between an inbox and a channel? An inbox is the organizational space your team works out of (the folder in the sidebar). A channel is a message source — a Gmail address, an Office 365 shared mailbox, an SMS number — that feeds conversations into an inbox. One shared inbox can have multiple channels connected to it.

How do I connect a Gmail or Office 365 mailbox? Click Channels → Connect channel, then choose Google for Gmail/Google Workspace or Microsoft → Office 365 → Shared mailbox for Exchange Online; both use OAuth. For an Office 365 shared mailbox, the person connecting it must be a Front admin with Full Mailbox Permissions (Read and manage, Send as, Send on behalf). For other providers, use Other email account to set up a forwarding/SMTP inbox.

What are ticket statuses and IDs on a shared inbox? They're on by default. Each conversation gets a status and a ticket ID; the ID prefix auto-populates from the first three alphabetic letters of the inbox name, so you can reference a conversation (e.g. SUP-1042) in Slack or on a call.

Can I add AI to a Front shared inbox without replacing Front? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Front as a live connector and runs on top of your existing inbox and rules — it doesn't replace them. Your inbox keeps routing deterministically; the agent reads the conversation, understands intent, and drafts or sends a grounded reply.

Ready to turn "routed to the right inbox" into "actually answered"? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.