How do I grant my colleague access to my email without sharing my password?

Contents of this article

• Introduction
• Benefits of Delegated Access
• Limitations of Delegation
• Delegate emails don't copy to your inbox
• Setting Up Delegation (Video)
• Revoking Access

Introduction

How do you grant email access to another colleague without sharing your login details (because we don't do that - do we!)

Delegating access is designed to help you have someone else look after or monitor your email temporarily. Here are some common scenarios:

• You going on leave, and someone else needs to look out for an email
• You job share with another user
• Your assistant or PA/EA needs access to help you with your email
• You have a common externally facing address that multiple team members help manage

Benefits of Delegated Access

Using delegated access allows you to: 

• Share accounts on a temporary or permanent basis without needing to share passwords or fumble with security issues 
• You can get accountability to see which users do what within gmail.com (i.e. who sent which email and when) 
• Your team can set up labels to help know what stage an email thread is in and who is responsible for action next 
• Everybody sees the same view of gmail.com 

Note that delegation is only available on the gmail.com website, not via the Gmail mobile apps. 

What a delegate cannot do: 

Delegates are limited to managing email. 

This process does not allow them access to your calendar, contacts, or anything you have in Google Drive. These applications have other ways to share and control access.

The delegate cannot access your settings in Gmail or in any other area of your account. So, for example, the delegate cannot help you change your signature or set up out-of-office. 

What delegation does not do: 

Delegation allows you to view / manage email in the other person's inbox. It does not mean a copy of email sent to that person is also sent to your inbox. 

To have a copy of email sent to your own inbox, we must either use a group, or create a routing rule depending on your objective. Reach out to our team for help on this. 

How to set up Delegation:

Google Workspace Care Plan clients

Please create a ticket with us, and we'll make this happen for you - tell us which user needs access to which other user. 

Do it yourself

If you do not have a Google Workspace Care Plan with us, a user can do this by inviting the user if they wish to grant access. 

This video walks you through how this is done.

Revoking delegated access

Note you can revoke the access you have granted to the other user at any time.