New Proton Groups does not work as expected...

I expected Proton Groups to be a copy of shared inboxes from Microsoft or Google. Instead, it is simply an email address that forwards messages to individuals that an admin adds to a group address. It is not a shared inbox where a team can organize, respond, and collaborate on emails.

  • Every team member will receive a separate copy of emails sent to the group address. There's no distinguishing between whether any other team members have viewed the message, and no way to respond from the group email address - you have to respond from your personal address.
  • Because you must reply from your personal address, there's no way to easily create a custom signature for the group account. For example, our team would want a customer support signature - not the individual team member's personal signature. On Google's version, you can have a group signature and it automatically leaves a notation beneath to show who sent the message, so it's somewhat personalized too.
  • Since there's no separated inbox dedicated to the group address, every individual group member will need to manually create filters to better manage messages sent to the group address. This is a very poor way to handle messages sent to teams, because there's no way to manage the filters as an admin without manually going into every group member's account to set up the filters. My personal inbox can be organized with filters to split things like direct messages, group messages, invoices, etc - while coworkers will struggle to manage all messages flooding into their one primary inbox.

What Proton Groups needs:

  • A separate shared inbox that all members can toggle to from their individual account upon being added. This makes it so a separate shared login/password is still unnecessary.
  • The ability to send messages from the group address, not just reply to messages from the individual's address.
  • Email signatures dedicated to the group address.
  • Notations to show who has viewed a message.
  • Shared drafts and sent folders.
  • The ability to use filters, tags, and folders unique to just the group inbox.

While I'm happy that more collaborative features are finally coming to Proton Business, this new Groups feature really misses the point of collaborative team/group accounts.