Sharing Email Accounts

[bruncher]

Please can someone recommend a solution for a small charity (exactly the same for a small business I expect) where multiple persons need access to the same email account on multiple devices at multiple locations. This isn't likely to be more than three or four people using any one email account.

Many email clients require a code sent to the mobile phone of the account holder, so this makes it impossible to share email accounts except at one location where everyone uses an office mobile to log in.

The organisation has its own domain, not sure if that helps.

Many thanks to anyone who has the expertise to help.

[tacpot12]

I can't provide the solution you are looking for, but our small club has a number of generic emails set up for certain roles, and a number of group email addresses, e.g. for the committee. Emails to those addresess are forwarded to the personal email address of the members of the group or role holder. The personal email addressess are used for all sending of emails. Would this work for you?

No-one ever logs into the generic email accounts, other than to set-up or change the forwarding.

[1nvest]

Not sure, but wouldn't something like a gmail or yahoo email account suffice? Might complain if more than one attempts to log in at the same time as another is using it though.

[Infrasonic]

Even with domain email you shouldn't have any real issue accessing from multiple client devices (mobiles, laptop's etc.) from multiple locations either with email clients like Outlook/Thunderbird or webmail via a browser...

You need to provide more specific details about who your domain/domain email host is and what tier of service you have (£ -££-£££ basic or business et al).

[Infrasonic]

I have a paid Protonmail account, which offers an entire E2EE ecosystem (Email with domains, Calendar, Cloud storage, VPN, Notes app, Password manager...) and Proton do charity discounts...https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/com ... discounts/

https://proton.me/mail/pricing

[Infrasonic]

...Many email clients require a code sent to the mobile phone of the account holder, so this makes it impossible to share email accounts except at one location where everyone uses an office mobile to log in...

If you need MFA at multiple locations many of the authenticator/password/passkeys apps now have cloud sync and multi client capability.

Once client devices/browsers have been authorised it is often possible to allow list them for future use without MFA, the only time you'd probably have to use it after that would be to access the account settings (admin). Obviously there are security implications there if a laptop or phone got stolen or lost and it had unfettered access...

I run my Proton password manager with a master pin that times out after five minutes, so no matter which device I am on I have to enter the master pin first before it will autofill passwords or access via passkey biometrics (FR or Fingerprint).

There are also Fido 2 hardware security keys that can be used, one or two per office site should suffice, USB/NFC/Biometric (FP) options etc.
Yubikey are the big name but there are cheaper alternatives like the Swiss one I posted yesterday on here.

[bruncher]

Even with domain email you shouldn't have any real issue accessing from multiple client devices (mobiles, laptop's etc.) from multiple locations either with email clients like Outlook/Thunderbird or webmail via a browser...

You need to provide more specific details about who your domain/domain email host is and what tier of service you have (£ -££-£££ basic or business et al).

OK thanks, I'm not directly involved but I'll see what I can find out.