Why We Built the Team Feature: Email Is Not a Solo Sport

Every email alias service on the market treats email as a personal activity. One account, one person, one inbox. But that is not how businesses work.

A company has info@, support@, sales@. Multiple people need access. The usual solution? Share the password. We have seen it dozens of times during beta: teams passing around credentials in Slack, disabling 2FA because you cannot share a TOTP code, and having no idea who changed what.

The problem we kept hearing

During our early access period, the same request came up repeatedly: "I want my assistant to see my messages but not change my filters." "I want my partner to manage our shared domain but not access billing." "I need to give a contractor read-only access to our support alias."

These are not edge cases. They are how email works in teams of 2 or more.

What we built

Cleanbox Teams turns your account into a workspace. Resources (aliases, mailboxes, contacts, messages, filters, Shield, domains, relay, cloud) belong to the team, not to your personal account. Each team member logs in with their own credentials, their own 2FA, and their own timezone.

Three roles

• Owner — Full control including billing, API access, and the ability to transfer or delete the team
• Admin — Member management, all features except billing
• Member — Access based on per-feature read/write permissions

Granular permissions

For team members, you control access per scope: mailboxes, aliases, messages, contacts, filters, Shield, domains, relay, and cloud. Each scope can be no access, read-only, or read/write. A support agent gets read access to messages and contacts. An IT admin gets full access to domains and relay. A freelancer gets read-only on everything.

Why not just use Google Workspace groups?

Google Workspace has delegation and groups. Microsoft 365 has shared mailboxes. But these are tied to a specific provider. If your team uses Gmail for some members and Outlook for others, there is no shared access layer.

Cleanbox Teams works across providers because it sits in front of them. Your aliases and relay addresses are managed in one place regardless of which mailboxes your team members use.

Multiple teams per account

You can be a member of multiple teams. Personal email on one team, company on another, client project on a third. Switch between them with one click. Your personal settings (password, timezone, 2FA) follow you everywhere.

This was a deliberate architecture decision from the start: resources belong to teams, not users. It cost us more engineering time than the alternative, but it means team management "just works" without retrofitting.

Teams are available on every plan, including Free. Learn how to invite your first team member.