To improve communications, businesses will often create shared mailboxes for their departments, teams and functions. For example, your business may have a dedicated sales or marketing mailbox, they may also have a shared mailbox for all those involved with specific projects.
By default, Odoo does not provide a way to store these email addresses against your company without creating a company contact – which is not the intended use of this function.
We solved this by developing the Shared Mailbox module.
The Challenge
Although Odoo does allow users to store email addresses against your company, this could only be done by saving several company emails under ‘person’ contacts for emails such as ‘accounts@domain.com’. This approach can cause confusion as these contacts for the company would appear as individual people rather than a group.
We were asked to find a better solution to this requirement.
The Solution
We launched the shared mailbox module to allow users to separate shared email addresses in a company from other contacts. This allows users to create shared email address contact types that differ from regular contact types. Ultimately, this prevents potential errors when selecting a company contact in a form view. It also means users can send emails to shared emails, increasing the chances of a timely reply.
How it Works
We developed a module that creates a contact type for a shared mailbox, allowing users to add generic email accounts to a company, such as accounts@domain.com.
This approach helps differentiate between the several types of contacts for a partner. It also prevents any generic contacts from being added which could show up in the selection of a partner’s contact on a form view.
Additionally, if you are sending an email and know it is for the accounts department, for example, instead of sending it to a contact who is in the accounts department, you can send it to the accounts shared mailbox email.