Setting Up Additional Emails for Your Business
Why to use department emails, aliases, and shared inboxes as you grow — and how to set them up in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
As your business grows, running everything through one personal inbox gets
messy fast. Setting up additional email addresses — like sales@,
support@, or billing@ — helps you look professional, get messages to the
right person, and keep your personal email private. There are two main ways to
do it: aliases and shared inboxes. Here's when to use each, and where to
set them up.
Why set up extra email addresses
- Route by department. Addresses like
sales@,support@,service@, andbilling@send customers to the right place, and keep each type of message where it belongs. - Hand things off as you grow. When you hire, you point the shared address at the new person instead of forwarding from your own inbox — a clean handoff, with the history intact.
- Train customers to reach the right people. Publishing department addresses teaches customers (and your team) to use them, so the right person answers instead of everything landing on you.
- Keep your personal email private. Put a professional, shared address on your website, ads, and business cards — not the personal inbox you'd rather keep to yourself.
- Auto-organize with labels and rules. Because each message is addressed to
a specific address (say,
support@), you can automatically label, sort, or forward it based on who it was sent to.
Aliases vs. shared inboxes
The right choice mostly comes down to one question: does one person handle these emails, or a team?
Aliases
An alias is an extra address that delivers into an existing mailbox. Mail to
sales@yourbusiness.com simply lands in your own inbox.
- Pros: free and instant, no extra license, and you can filter or label by the alias. Perfect for a solo owner or a small team.
- Cons: everything still lands in one person's inbox, so it doesn't scale to a team sharing the workload — and, depending on setup, replies may come from your main address rather than the alias.
Best for: one person handling the address.
Shared inboxes
A shared inbox (Microsoft calls it a shared mailbox; Google does it with a Collaborative Inbox) is a separate mailbox that several people can open, read, and reply from as the shared address.
- Pros: a whole team can monitor and respond, replies come from the shared address, you can see who's handling what, and the history stays in one place as people join or leave.
- Cons: a bit more to set up (usually through your email admin), and on some plans it may need specific configuration.
Best for: a team — or a growing one — sharing the same queue.
How to set them up
The exact steps live in your email provider's own help docs. Here are the right pages:
Microsoft 365
- Add an email alias to a user — Microsoft's guide
- Create a shared mailbox — Microsoft's guide (about shared mailboxes)
Google Workspace
- Add an email alias to a user — Google's guide
- Set up a shared inbox (Collaborative Inbox) — Google's guide
Heads up: most of these need admin access. Creating shared mailboxes and adding aliases is done by whoever manages your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account. If that's not you, loop in your IT person or admin — it only takes them a few minutes.
Still stuck?
Want a hand deciding how to structure your business email addresses? Reach out and we'll help you map it out.