Sharing Folders with Your Team

When the account owner shares a folder, it appears inside the webmail Drive of every mailbox in the account. There's no per-mailbox permission grid, no invitation email, no acceptance step, just one toggle on the folder, and now everyone in the account can see it.

This guide covers when sharing makes sense, how it works, and the few edge cases that matter.

Two ways shared folders happen

There are two paths into the shared state, and they end up at the same place:

1. The account owner shares an existing folder. In Account Drive (/drive), the owner finds the folder, opens its three-dot menu, and picks Share with account. Done, every mailbox in the account now sees that folder in their webmail.

2. A mailbox owner creates a top-level folder marked as shared. Inside webmail Drive, when creating a new top-level folder, the mailbox owner can check Share with account. The folder is created directly in Account Drive (not in the mailbox-private space) and is shared from the moment it exists.

The second path is for cases where a mailbox owner is the natural curator of a shared resource. Your marketing lead might create the "Brand assets" folder; your operations lead might create "Runbooks." Routing those creations through the account owner just to share is unnecessary friction.

In both cases, the resulting folder lives in Account Drive and is visible to everyone.

What mailbox owners see

When a mailbox owner opens their webmail Drive, the file list shows two zones:

• Their own personal folders: the ones they created in their own webmail Drive, private to them.
• Shared folders: every folder the account owner (or another mailbox owner via path 2) has shared with the account.

Shared folders are visually marked with a small "Shared" badge so it's clear which is which. Mailbox owners can browse, download, upload to, and delete inside shared folders just as they can in their own, sharing grants full read/write access. Sharing is binary: shared or not. There's no read-only mode.

This binary model is intentional. It keeps the rules simple for everyone. If you don't want a mailbox to be able to write to a folder, don't share that folder with the account.

What gets shared, exactly

When you share a folder, three things follow:

• Every file currently inside the folder: they become visible to all mailboxes.
• Every subfolder: recursively, all the way down.
• Anything added later: a file uploaded into a shared folder tomorrow is automatically visible to the team without any extra action.

Conversely, you can't share a subfolder while leaving its parent unshared, and you can't selectively un-share a single file inside a shared folder. Sharing is parent-down only. If you need a more granular split, restructure the folders, move the items that should stay private up to a non-shared folder.

Sharing limits

An existing Account Drive folder is shared in place, so making it visible to the account does not copy its files or create extra storage use. The 1,000-file migration cap applies only to a top-level personal folder that is being moved into Account Drive by a supported migration flow.

For normal dashboard sharing, create or move the content into an Account Drive folder first, then use Share with account. If a personal-folder migration reports that it is too large, split that folder into smaller groups before trying again.

When to share, when not to

Share when:

• The folder is a shared resource: brand assets, templates, runbooks, onboarding decks. Everyone benefits from a single up-to-date copy.
• You'd otherwise be emailing copies around. If three mailboxes need the same set of contracts, share the folder once instead of attaching them every time.
• You want a public-facing curator. If your marketing lead is responsible for keeping brand assets fresh, give them access to the folder where those assets live and remove the round-trip through the account owner.

Don't share when:

• The folder contains sensitive material (financial records, HR documents, board minutes). Keep these in unshared Account Drive folders that only the owner sees.
• The folder is per-client and another client should never see it. Either keep clients in separate accounts, or keep client folders unshared and bring just the relevant files into a shared deliverables folder.
• The folder is personal to one mailbox owner. Personal files go in webmail Drive (not shared by default), not in Account Drive.

Stopping sharing

The owner can revoke a share at any time. Three-dot menu on the folder → Stop sharing. The folder reverts to dashboard-only visibility. Mailbox owners no longer see it in their webmail Drive.

Important: stopping a share does not delete files. Everything inside the folder stays where it is, but only the account owner can reach it through the dashboard /drive URL.

If a mailbox owner had a file open or was downloading a file at the moment sharing was revoked, that operation might still complete (the URL was already signed). Future access requires the share to be re-enabled.

Stopping a share that a mailbox owner created

Recall the second path, a mailbox owner can create a folder and share it with the account at creation time. Once that folder exists in Account Drive, the account owner is the one who can stop sharing it. The original creator (mailbox owner) cannot un-share it themselves.

This is a deliberate guardrail. Once a folder exists in the account-wide space, it's part of the company's shared resources. Allowing the original creator to unilaterally pull it back would be confusing for the rest of the team.

If the original creator wants their work back as a private mailbox file, the workflow is: ask the account owner to stop sharing → the folder stays in Account Drive (still visible to the owner only) → owner moves the relevant files back to the creator if appropriate.

Sharing and Trash

Delete a shared folder and it goes to Trash. While in Trash:

• The share is paused. Mailbox owners stop seeing it in their webmail Drive.
• The 30-day retention clock starts.
• The bytes still count against your storage pool.

Restore the folder from Trash and the share reactivates automatically. You don't need to re-toggle anything. Trash forever-deletes the folder and the share is gone.

Sharing and storage

A shared folder doesn't double-count storage. It's one copy of each file, accessible from multiple places. If a 1 GB file lives inside a shared folder, the pool counts it once, not once per mailbox that can see it.

This means sharing is essentially free in terms of pool consumption. Worry about what you put in the folder, not whether to share it.

A practical workflow

For a small team setting up a fresh account:

1. Account owner creates Account Drive folders they expect to share: Brand assets, Templates, Runbooks, Client deliverables (or whatever fits).
2. Owner shares each one with the account via the three-dot menu.
3. Owner uploads the initial set of files into each folder. Mailbox owners now see them.
4. Mailbox owners can drop new files into the shared folders directly from webmail. No round-trip needed for routine adds.
5. For sensitive folders (Finance, HR, Tax) the owner does not share, those stay dashboard-only.

This keeps the shared/private distinction clear and avoids accidental leaks.

What's next

• Public Share Links, share a single file outside the company, not just inside.
• Drive in Webmail, what mailbox owners see and how they use shared folders.
• Trash and File Restoration, recovering a shared folder you accidentally deleted.
• Account Drive: First Steps, back to the basics if you skipped ahead.