Gmail – Can Employees Share the Same Inbox?

We needed to setup a distribution list where there were many aliases but they all were delivered to the same users. The best approach we found was creating a fake user account, setting up aliases on that account, forwarding the email to a real group, and using the group membership function to setup the distribution list. Works reasonably well, but having aliases for a group would be better.

Looks like you can also nest groups within groups. There is at least one help topic that recommends this approach. The above mentioned approach does give a few other features however, such as vacation responders and the ability to backup mailing list email using POP/IMAP.

To directly answer your question, no. Unfortunately it is not possible to simply convert an account to a Group.

You can follow the procedure below to migrate the mail from the account to the Group however some data will be lost. For instance the Group won't retain any of the labels / folders in the Gmail account. Additionally Groups doesn't support contacts or calendar data.

1. Rename the account
2. When the account is renamed, it will automatically be given an alias matching the accounts old name. Delete this alias.
3. Create a Google Group using the old / desired email address. As soon as the alias is deleted you can create a Google group using the same email address.
4. Use GAMME (Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange) to migrate the email from the now renamed account to the Group
5. Delete the account

GAMME supports Google Apps to Google Apps migration of mail. Additional information can be found here: Migrate data from Exchange using GAMME The GAMME Admin guide (a PDF) can be found here.