Managing team email: permissions, shared inboxes, and staff changes

Team email is single-user email with a management layer on top. The core questions are who can create mailboxes, who can see what, and what happens when someone joins or leaves.

Permission levels

The admin account has full access: creating and deleting mailboxes, managing DNS records, viewing billing and audit logs, and inviting or removing members.

A regular member can only access their own mailbox — either through webmail or an IMAP client.

Some providers offer an intermediate tier, such as "can manage mailboxes but not DNS," which lets an operations person handle onboarding without touching the DNS configuration.

Shared inboxes

Most teams need at least one shared address for external contact: support@, sales@, or hello@. The common options:

Shared credentials: one mailbox account with a password distributed to several people. Simple, but no audit trail for who replied to what.

Forwarding: messages to support@ are forwarded to each team member's individual mailbox. Each person replies from their own address unless a sender alias is configured separately.

Alias: support@ is configured as an alias pointing to a real mailbox. Mail arrives in one place; replies can be sent with support@ as the From address. Rovela supports multiple inbound aliases per mailbox.

Onboarding and offboarding

When someone starts: create a mailbox, set an initial password, and share the IMAP server settings.

When someone leaves: disable the mailbox or redirect its incoming mail to whoever takes over. Rovela's disable function stops send and receive immediately but keeps message history, so the admin can export or transfer anything important before closing the account.

Bulk operations

Once the team has more than ten people, creating mailboxes one by one is slow. The standard approach is a CSV upload — one row per person with name and address — and the system creates all the accounts in one shot. Rovela supports CSV import on the Members page and also exposes an API endpoint for creating mailboxes, so it can be wired into an existing HR onboarding workflow.