Are you looking for an easier way to share email messages with your colleagues? Are you tired of emailing back and forth? Wouldn’t it be easier if you all shared a common label in Gmail, so that each one of you could easily access that label from your own Inbox?
If you have a Google Apps account, you can already collaborate on documents, but what about email? Well, if you’d really like to collaborate from within your email Inbox, you can do so using an online tool called Grexit. Using this service you can share labels in Gmail and share email archives.
With Grexit, you’ll be able to keep your Inbox clean and free from back-and-forth email correspondence. No longer will you need to forward email messages to your colleagues. Grexit is basically like the middle man who brings your whole team together using Gmail.
So here’s how to share your Gmail folders for collaboration and support.
Getting Started
1. Sign up for an account at Grexit using your Google Apps email address; click “allow” to give Grexit access to your Google account.
2. Once you go through the introductory tour, you’ll find yourself on the Grexit dashboard.
3. Start by creating a shared label; click on the “create shared label” button.
4. You can choose to share a label that is already in your Inbox, or you can create a totally new label.
5. Next enter the users that you want to collaborate on that label with. You can also create a group under “users and groups” (from the left navigation column) and select that group to share your label with.
Note: You can only share with other users under your Google Apps domain; Grexit will not allow you to share outside of your domain – as I’ve tried to do in the screenshot above.
6. Choose whether or not to ask for permission from the selected users; if you choose not to do this, Grexit will not send out approval emails and the users will be able to share your label(s) right away.
Note: It can take up to 5 minutes for emails within a label to be synced among users.
Fetch Rules
7. Next you can choose to set up a fetch rule for the shared label. Fetch rules are much like email filters. You can tell Grexit to gather specific types of email messages from your Inbox and automatically add them to your shared label.
You can also use fetch rules to automatically add specific labels to your email messages.
Tags
8. Tags in Grexit “are a feature that helps you and your colleagues together organize the content you have added to Grexit, and collaborate around it.” You and your colleagues can add a tag to a conversation, remove a tag from a conversation, and create new tags.
9. You can also add Access Rules to your tags. Click on “Tags” in the left navigation column, find your tag and click on “set up” to create an Access Rule.
An Access Rule only gives certain people access to that specific tag. This way, you can collaborate with everyone within your Google Apps domain, but only give individual users access to the conversations that you choose.
10. If you want to edit a label or add a new label, click on “Shared Labels” in the left navigation column and then click on the “Create Shared Labe” button. You can also edit, delete and deactivate a shared label from here.
There’s definitely a lot to Grexit, and it may take some time to get everything perfect. However, once you get everything set up your team will be collaborating in style!
Thanks for the article!
We've built SquadMail, which works like "Dropbox for email" and allows you to share gmail labels with your team. Additionally, each label gets its own email address so you can send emails straight to a group of people without having to CC them altogether. Last but not least you can also synchronized your Gmail labels with your Dropbox and automatically extract attachments to just the right place in your inbox.
Its free, secure and fun to use!