Migrating from a shared inbox without losing anything

You have four years of email in a shared mailbox. Here is how to move to a ticket queue without dropping a live conversation.

Do not import everything

The instinct is to import the entire mailbox. Resist it. Old threads become thousands of stale open tickets that nobody will ever close, and the queue is worthless from day one. Keep the mailbox as an archive you can search.

The cutover

Week 1: set the desk up and let two staff use it in parallel with the mailbox.

Week 2: forward the shared address into the desk. New mail becomes tickets; the team answers from the ticket, never from the mailbox.

Week 3: anything still live in the old mailbox is manually raised as a ticket — usually fewer than thirty.

Week 4: remove mailbox access from everyone except one administrator.

The rule that makes it stick

If it is not in a ticket, it did not happen. The moment one senior person keeps answering from their own inbox, everyone else does too, and you are back where you started.