A shared inbox and an agent inbox can look similar from the outside.
Both create an address for a job: support, sales, vendors, operations, or approvals. Both can receive email that should not live in one person's personal mailbox.
The difference is what the inbox is designed to operate.
Shared inboxes are built for teams
A shared inbox helps people collaborate around messages. The usual features are assignment, comments, status, collision avoidance, and sometimes reporting.
That is useful when humans are the primary workers.
Agent inboxes are built for delegated work
An agent inbox assumes a software worker may receive, read, classify, respond, and act under scoped authority.
That changes the required controls:
- API access with scoped tokens.
- Workflow rules and webhooks.
- Labels and Files as work primitives.
- Approval gates for sensitive actions.
- Usage caps and sender rules.
- Audit records tied to agent activity.
The inbox is not only shared by people. It is operated by an agent.
The overlap is real
Some workflows need both. A customer message might start in an agent inbox, get classified and summarized by the agent, then move to a human team for final handling. A vendor invoice might be parsed automatically, then escalated if fields are missing.
The important question is where the agent's authority and record live.
Choose based on the worker
Use a shared inbox when humans are the main operators and the system mostly coordinates their work.
Use an agent inbox when an AI agent or application needs its own address, credentials, workflow actions, and audit trail.
That is how we draw the line at gent.mx. We are not trying to make another place for humans to manually sort mail. We are building the surface where delegated email work can happen under visible rules.
For more context, see shared inbox AI agents and compare agent inboxes.