Addresses like info@, support@ and sales@ belong to a role instead of a person. Setting them up as ordinary mailboxes with a shared password works, and it creates problems that only appear once more than one person is involved.
Three ways to do it
A mailbox with a shared password. Everyone logs in as the same account. Simple and the worst of the three.
A forwarder to individual mailboxes. Mail arrives in each person's own inbox. Uses no disk and creates no shared credential.
A real mailbox with IMAP access shared by several people. Everyone connects with their own client to the same mailbox and sees the same state.
Which fits depends on whether people need to see what each other has done.
Why the shared password is the wrong default
It cannot be revoked for one person. Someone leaves and the only option is changing it for everyone, which means telling everyone, which means it does not happen promptly.
There is no record of who did what. A message deleted or sent from that address cannot be attributed, and on a support address that matters.
And it is nearly always reused. A password given to five people is in five password managers, five browsers and probably one text message.
Forwarders: the right answer for low volume
For an address receiving a few messages a day that one or two people handle, a forwarder is the simplest thing that works.
No mailbox means no disk consumed and no password to share. Each person receives the mail in their own inbox, where their own two-factor authentication protects it. There is more on creating one in setting up email forwarders.
Two limitations to know about.
Nobody can see what anyone else did. Two people can answer the same message, and neither knows.
Replies come from the individual. A customer writing to support@ gets an answer from jane@ and replies to Jane, so the next message bypasses the role address entirely.
Most mail clients can send as another address if configured, and that fixes the second problem. It has to be set up deliberately per person.
Shared IMAP: the right answer for a queue
When several people work an address and need to see what has been handled, a real mailbox accessed by everyone is the arrangement.
Read status, folders and sent messages are on the server, so everyone sees the same thing. Moving a message to a "done" folder tells the others.
The credential problem remains, and it is the reason to keep this to genuinely shared work instead of using it everywhere.
Forwarding to an external provider has a cost
Worth knowing before pointing a role address at a free mail provider.
Forwarded mail arrives at the destination from your server, carrying the original sender's address. That fails the original sender's SPF check, and the receiving provider attributes the failure to you.
A role address forwarding a lot of spam therefore damages your own domain's reputation. On a low-volume address it is unnoticeable; on a busy info@ receiving mostly spam it is not. For why the check fails, see understanding SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Filter aggressively before forwarding, or collect the mail from a real mailbox instead.
The catch-all is not a role address
A catch-all receives everything sent to any address at the domain, including the thousands of guessed addresses spam senders try.
It is the usual reason a mailbox nobody reads becomes the largest thing on the account. It also means a typo in your own address still arrives, which sounds helpful and hides the typo indefinitely.
Turn it off and create the addresses you actually use. Managing mailbox quotas walks through what fills an account.
Which addresses to create
Fewer than people expect. Each one is something to monitor, and an unmonitored address is worse than a missing one. A customer writes to it and hears nothing.
For most small businesses: one general address, one for billing if that is a different person, and postmaster@ and abuse@, which are conventional and occasionally receive genuinely important mail from other providers.
Add a role address when someone owns it, not in anticipation.
Sending as the role address
However you receive it, replies should come from the role address so the conversation stays with the team.
That needs the mail client configured to send as that address, authenticating with a real mailbox. Most clients support it; some require the account to exist as a mailbox instead of a forwarder, which is a reason to choose the mailbox even when a forwarder would do for receiving.
Test it by sending to an external address and checking what appears in the From line, and check it does not land in spam, since sending as an address you are not authenticated for is exactly what authentication is designed to catch. Configuring email in Outlook deals with the settings.
When someone leaves
The reason all of this matters, and the moment it is tested.
With forwarders: remove them from the forwarder list. Thirty seconds, nothing else affected.
With a shared mailbox: change the password and give it to everyone remaining.
Then convert their personal address to a forwarder rather than deleting it, so mail sent to them reaches whoever took over. Deleting it means senders get a bounce saying the address does not exist, which is a bad way for a customer to learn somebody left.
When someone leaves, the mailbox is where the correspondence lives and deleting it removes the record. How to Archive and Retain Business Email walks through the sequence that avoids it.