How to set up a family email address

What a family email address is, and what it fixes

A family email address — a shared family email, a household email address, one email address for the whole family; the same idea under four names — is a single mailbox you give out for anything that belongs to the household rather than to a person. The school. Before and after school care. Swimming. The GP and the dentist. The vet. The plumber, the electricity retailer, the strata manager, the airline you booked the family trip with.

It fixes one specific thing, and it's worth being precise about what: it stops household admin being addressed to one person. When the school has one parent's work address on file, that parent is the only one who knows the excursion form is due. They become the household's project manager by accident, and the other parent can't help with something they never saw. A shared address makes the mail arrive somewhere that belongs to both of you.

What it does not automatically fix is who deals with the mail once it arrives. Hold that thought — it's the whole second half of this guide.

Three ways to do it, and how to choose

Every family email address is one of three shapes. Pick the shape first; the setup follows from it.

If you want this done today and free, take Route 1. If you already own a domain, or you expect to be doing this for the next fifteen years, Route 2 pays for itself. Route 3 suits households where nobody will realistically log into a second mailbox.

Naming it (and what not to put in the name)

You will read this address aloud at a school counter and spell it down a phone line to a receptionist. Optimise for that.

• Family name, then a word. thesmiths@, smithfamily@, smithhouse@, smithhq@. Short, sayable, spellable.
• Or the house, not the people. 12elmstreet@ survives a name change and reads as an address, which is what it is.
• No children's names, no birth years, no school name. This address gets handed to sports clubs, tradespeople and booking sites. Don't encode who lives there and how old they are.
• No dots, no hyphens, no numbers you'd have to spell out. Every one of those is a mis-hearing waiting to happen.
• Don't date it. smiths2026@ looks fine for four months.

Say your shortlist out loud to each other. The one that survives being spelled over a bad phone line is the one.

Route 1: a shared Gmail account, step by step

This is the version most households end up with, and done properly it is genuinely good. It costs nothing. Seven steps; the first four are the ones that matter.

1. Create the account

Make a new Google Account for personal use at accounts.google.com with the name you settled on. Use a recovery phone number and recovery email that both of you can reach — a recovery number on one parent's phone is a single point of failure the day that parent is in a meeting and the other one is locked out at a school office.

2. Make it a mailbox two people can actually get into

• Turn on 2-step verification, and set it up so both of you can pass it — printed backup codes kept somewhere you'd both look, or an authenticator app both of you have enrolled.
• Put the password in a shared password manager vault, not in a text message and not on a note stuck to the fridge.
• Decide now what happens if you separate. An address holding a decade of school and medical mail is worth a two-minute conversation before it holds any.

3. Point the household's mail at it

Nothing works until the senders know. Go through the switch list below and change the address on file — school portal first, since it's the loudest sender in most households. Where a system only allows one contact address per parent, put the family address on the parent who reads it least; that way both of you end up seeing everything.

4. Forward it to both of you

A mailbox nobody opens is worse than no mailbox. Forward its mail into the inboxes you already read. In the family account, per Google's own instructions:

1. Settings (the gear) → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
2. Add a forwarding address, enter the first parent's everyday address, and confirm it — Google emails a verification message to that address which has to be clicked before forwarding will run.
3. Repeat for the second parent, so both addresses are verified and available.
4. Choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to, pick an address, and — this is the part people get wrong — set the dropdown to keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox. If you tell it to delete Gmail's copy, you've built a redirect with no archive, and the shared history you wanted doesn't exist.
5. Save.

That setting points at one address at a time. To reach both parents, leave it on one of you and add a filter for the other: click the search box → Show search options → put the family address in the To field → Create filter → tick Forward it to and choose the second verified address. Same trick for a third recipient — a grandparent who does school pickups, say.

5. Reply as the family address

This is the step most people skip, and skipping it undoes most of the benefit. Without it, you reply to the school from your personal inbox, the school files your personal address, and the next twelve emails go to you alone. In each parent's own Gmail:

1. Settings → See all settings → Accounts and Import.
2. Under Send mail as, choose Add another email address, enter the family address, and send the verification. Google mails a confirmation link to the family account; click it from there.
3. In the same section, set replies to go out from the address the message was sent to, rather than always from your default address. Now a reply to something forwarded from the family address goes back out as the family address, without you having to remember.

Worth knowing before you build on this: Google has announced that from January 2027 you will no longer be able to send mail from third-party email accounts in Gmail, and that Gmailify and checking mail from other accounts on the web are going too. Gmail-to-Gmail aliases and Google Workspace "Send as" are not affected (Gmail Help, checked 14 September 2026). In practice: if your family address is a Gmail address, this step keeps working. If you were planning to run an address on your own domain through Gmail's send-as, read Route 2 with that date in mind.

6. Or skip forwarding entirely: delegate the mailbox

There's a better-kept option. Gmail lets you grant another Google account access to your mailbox: Settings → Accounts and Import → Grant access to your account → Add another account, and the other person confirms from an email Google sends them. Per Gmail Help, personal @gmail.com accounts can add up to 10 delegates, and a delegate can read, send and delete mail in the account but can't change its password.

Delegation beats forwarding on the thing forwarding is worst at: you are both looking at the same mailbox, so a message one of you opens is read for both of you, and there's one archive rather than two copies. Two caveats. It's an account switch in Gmail rather than mail arriving in your own inbox, so people forget to look. And Google's help page notes that when a delegate sends a message from the account, their own email address appears — so a delegated reply can still put a personal address on the thread.

7. Filters and labels, so it isn't a swamp by March

A family address collects newsletters at a rate a personal one never does. In the family account, spend twenty minutes on:

• A label per child, and a filter putting each school's address on it. When there are two schools and three activities, "which kid is this about" stops being a reading exercise.
• A Newsletters label with Skip the Inbox ticked for the senders that never need an action — the school's weekly bulletin usually does need one, so read before you archive.
• A filter that stars anything with "permission", "consent", "invoice", "due" or "RSVP" in it. Crude, and it works.

Once a term, open the family account itself rather than reading it through forwards. Things accumulate there that neither of you has looked at.

Route 2: your own domain

Register a domain — your surname, your street, whatever is available and short — and put the household's mail on it. The address becomes yours rather than a provider's, which means the next time you change email host you change one setting with your domain company instead of telling forty organisations a new address. Fifteen years of school, medical and insurance mail is a long time to be renting your address from a company you might want to leave.

Two flavours, and the difference matters:

• Forwarding-only. Many registrars will forward hello@yourname.com to an existing inbox for free or nearly. Cheapest, and it has exactly the limits of any forward: no shared archive of its own, and replying is somebody's personal address unless you also configure send-as.
• A real hosted mailbox. A few dollars a month for a mailbox that stores its own mail, which both of you can open in the mail app on your phone or computer. This is the version that gives you a genuine shared archive.

Whichever you choose: set the domain to auto-renew and put the renewal on a card that isn't about to expire. A lapsed domain doesn't bounce your school mail, it delivers it to whoever registers the name next. And note the January 2027 change above before you plan on reading and sending domain mail through Gmail's web interface — a hosted mailbox you open in a mail app is unaffected by it.

Aliases are the underrated part. One domain gives you school@, bills@, bookings@ — all landing in the same place, all sortable on arrival, and each one disposable if it starts attracting junk.

Route 3: a group address that fans out

If neither of you will realistically log into a second mailbox, use a group instead of an account. A Google Group gets an address in the googlegroups.com domain, keeps its conversations in a web archive, and delivers each message to every member's normal inbox. In the group's settings, Who can post has to be opened up — a school's mail system is not a member of your group — and Who can view conversations controls the archive (Google Groups Help).

The appeal is that there is no new inbox to check, and the archive means the mail isn't only in two personal inboxes. The limits are the ones any mailing list has: opening a message marks it read for you and nobody else, a reply sent from your own mail app goes out as you, and the group has no idea whether either of you has done anything about it.

The switch list: who to give it to

An address nobody writes to is just admin you did for fun. Work down this list over a week — most of it is a two-minute change in a portal.

Give it a term. Household mail arrives on a school calendar's rhythm, so you won't know whether it worked until you've been through an enrolment, a term of activities and a round of renewals.

Where the DIY route runs out

Everything above is worth doing, and for a lot of households it is enough. But a shared address plus forwarding solves delivery, and household admin isn't a delivery problem. It's an ownership problem. Here is exactly where the setup you just built stops.

1. You can't tell who has replied

Step 4 sent a copy of every message into two separate inboxes. Those copies know nothing about each other. When you open one, nothing happens in your partner's. When you answer the excursion email, their copy sits there unread and un-annotated, exactly as urgent-looking as it was before you dealt with it. So the household runs on the only mechanism it has left: asking. "Did you reply to the swimming thing?" — three times a week, forever. Two people answering the same email, and everybody assuming the other one did it, are the same bug seen from two sides.

This one has a guide of its own, because it is the half of the problem forwarding cannot touch at any level of effort: a shared family inbox vs forwarding covers what "state" means on a message, the free ways to get it — a Google Group turned into a Collaborative Inbox does most of it for nothing — and when forwarding is genuinely enough.

2. Replying puts your personal address back on the thread

This is the one every guide to family email eventually admits. The Third Shift's write-up of the same setup puts it plainly:

“If you stop at forwarding, you'll receive all the emails — great. But when you reply, the sender will see your personal email address. Which means they might start responding directly to you, cutting the other person out of the loop again”

Step 5 is the fix, and it's a real one — but it is a setting in each parent's personal Gmail that has to be right forever, on every device, including the phone you answer the school from at 7am. Get it wrong once and the school's next twelve emails go to one person, and you're back where you started without noticing. The failure is silent, which is what makes it expensive.

3. It's a new rule for every new sender

Forwarding rules are per-mailbox, and the useful ones are per-sender. Every new club, every new specialist, every school that changes its bulk-mail provider is another filter to write in a mailbox you open twice a year, in the personal inbox of whichever parent happened to give out their own address that time. Nobody keeps this up. The setup decays quietly, and the only symptom is a form that gets missed.

4. There is no shared archive with a state

Search across a forwarded setup means both of you searching your own mail and hoping. Nothing records that the permission slip was returned on the 14th, that the invoice was queried, that the dentist is waiting on you rather than the other way round. Read/unread is the only state email gives you, it's per-person, and it means "I have looked at this" — not "this is handled", and not "this is yours".

Handle it or tag it

If you take one habit from this page, take this one — it works with a shared Gmail and no other tooling at all. We call it handle it or tag it: if you open a message in the family account, you don't get to put it back. You either deal with it now, or you put the other person's name on it. A star, a label called Alex, a two-word reply in the thread — the mechanism doesn't matter. What matters is that every message you touch leaves with an owner.

The inbox becomes a to-do list rather than a filing cabinet, and "did anyone do this?" stops being a question you can only answer by asking a person.

The catch is that email won't help you keep it. There is no field in Gmail for "this is Alex's", nothing stops a message being read by both of you and owned by neither, and the whole scheme survives on two people remembering a house rule while standing in a school car park. That gap — between the rule everyone independently invents and the mail system that can't hold it — is the reason we built what's below, and the subject of shared family inbox vs forwarding if you want the mechanics rather than the product.

What we built instead

household.email is a shared family inbox where handle-it-or-tag-it is the software rather than a house rule. Your household picks its address at setup — thesmiths@household.email — and gives it to the school the same way you would have given out the Gmail one. From there:

• Every message has a state. Unhandled, in progress, waiting on a reply, resolved, archived, snoozed until a date, spam. Marking one handled takes you straight to the next unhandled message, because triage is a queue, not a folder.
• Every message has a history, with names on it. Who marked it as being dealt with, who replied, who forwarded it on, and when. "Did you reply to the swimming thing" is answered by opening the email.
• Ownership is per sender, so it sticks. Assign the school to one adult and their mail arrives in that adult's queue from then on — no rule to write, and no rewriting it when the school changes mail provider. Senders carry tags and a notification setting each, from immediate down to ignore.
• Replies go out as the household. Sent from the household's own mailbox rather than yours, so your personal address never joins the thread and the school keeps writing to the address both of you read. No per-device setting to get right, in either parent's Gmail.
• One archive, searchable by both of you. Full text plus from:, to:, subject: and body:. Email history is unlimited on both plans — nothing is trimmed at 30 days.
• The dates come out of the mail. Each message is read for the events and todos hiding in it, and they're offered as suggestions you accept or dismiss. Nothing lands on the household calendar without a person saying yes.
• Mail already going elsewhere can be pulled in. Connect Gmail, iCloud, Outlook or most other email accounts, forward one message from a sender to the household address, and that sender's mail is imported from then on — the answer to "a new rule per sender" is to forward once instead.

Questions people ask before they start

Should we have a family email address at all?

If household mail currently arrives at one parent's address, yes. The test isn't how much mail you get, it's whether both adults could answer "what's the school asking for this week?" without asking each other. A single-adult household gets less from it, though a separate address still keeps school and club mail out of the inbox you work in.

Can one email address really cover the whole family?

For anything addressed to the household, yes — that's the point. For anything addressed to a person, no: keep banking, work, tax and account recovery on personal addresses. Teenagers should have their own address for their own accounts; the family address is for the mail the household is responsible for.

Is a shared family email safe?

As safe as the login on it. Turn on 2-step verification, keep the password in a shared password manager rather than a text thread, and never use the family address for password recovery on financial accounts. And keep in mind that everyone with the login sees everything in it — which is the feature, but it means the school's note about one child is readable by every adult with access.

What happens to the address if we change providers, or separate?

On your own domain, the address moves with you and the answer is a settings change with your domain company. On a free shared account it doesn't move at all, which is the strongest argument for Route 2 if you expect to be doing this for a decade. Either way, decide who keeps it before it holds ten years of records.

Do we still need a family calendar?

Yes — but most of what goes on it arrives by email first. That's the loop household.email is built around: the mail is the input, the calendar and the todo list are the output, and a person confirms each one on the way through.

Sources

• The Third Shift — The Best Time to Set Up a Family Email Account Is Before Birth. The Second-Best Time Is Now., quoted above on what forwarding does to your reply address.
• Gmail Help — Automatically forward Gmail messages to another account.
• Gmail Help — Send emails from a different address or alias.
• Gmail Help — Delegate and collaborate on email, for delegate limits and what a delegate can do.
• Gmail Help — Changes to third-party email account support in Gmail, for the January 2027 changes.
• Google Groups Help — Create a group, for posting permissions and the conversation archive.

Menu paths in other people's products were checked against those pages on 14 September 2026. Products move — if a step here has gone stale, tell us and we'll fix it.