How to delegate access to your Gmail account

What does it mean to delegate access to your Gmail account?

If you have an assistant who triages your inbox, a teammate who covers a shared support address, or a colleague watching your mail while you are out, you have probably wished you could simply hand them the keys without handing over your password. That is exactly what Gmail delegation does. It lets you give another person the ability to read, send, and delete email in your account, working inside your mailbox as if it were their own, while your password, your security settings, and your account recovery stay entirely yours.

Delegation is one of Gmail's oldest and most useful features, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. People reach for it expecting something it is not, sharing a password, forwarding mail, or giving someone admin control, and then get confused when it behaves differently. So it is worth being precise from the start. A delegate is a specific, limited role. They get to operate your inbox; they do not get to become you. Every email a delegate sends from your account is openly stamped as sent by them on your behalf, so there is a clear, honest record of who actually did what.

This guide walks through the whole thing end to end, written for the two groups who search for it most: executives and managers setting up an assistant, and teams sharing a mailbox. We will cover how to grant access step by step on the desktop web, exactly what a delegate can and cannot do, how the other person accepts and starts using your account, how the "sent on behalf of" line works, the difference between personal Gmail and Google Workspace (including the admin setting that has to be on), how to remove a delegate cleanly, the awkward truth about delegation on mobile, the security questions you should ask before you do any of this, and how to fix it when it does not work. By the end you will know precisely what you are signing up for.

The classic use case is the executive assistant. A busy leader gives their EA delegate access so the assistant can clear routine mail, draft and send replies, schedule things, and flag the handful of messages that genuinely need the executive's eyes. The leader never shares a password, the EA never logs in as the leader, and recipients can always see that a message came from the assistant rather than pretending to be the boss. It is the digital equivalent of an assistant who manages your physical mail and correspondence, with a clear paper trail.

The second common use case is a shared or role-based mailbox. A small team running support@, sales@, or info@ can have several people added as delegates on that one account, so everyone sees the same incoming mail and any of them can respond, all under the shared address. It is a lightweight way to staff a common inbox without buying a separate help-desk product, and for many small teams it is enough to get started, though, as we will discuss near the end, it starts to creak once more than a couple of people are working the same mailbox at once.

Both use cases share the same appeal: access without exposure. You are extending a trusted person's reach into your mail without surrendering the credentials that protect everything else tied to your Google account, from your password to your other Google services. That boundary, what a delegate can touch and what stays off-limits, is the heart of the feature, so we will spend real time on it below.

How do you grant someone access to your Gmail account?

Setting up a delegate happens on the desktop web, in Gmail's settings, and takes a couple of minutes plus a short wait for the other person to accept. You cannot do it from the Gmail mobile app, so sit down at a computer for this part. The flow is the same for a personal @gmail.com account and a Google Workspace (work or school) account, with one caveat for Workspace that we will flag in the steps and cover fully later: your administrator has to have turned delegation on for it to appear at all.

Here is the complete step-by-step on a computer.

1. 1

   Open Gmail settings on a computer

   On the desktop web, open Gmail, click the gear icon in the top right, and choose "See all settings." Delegation lives only in the full settings screen and only on the web, so this cannot be done from a phone or tablet.

2. 2

   Go to the Accounts and Import tab

   Click the "Accounts and Import" tab along the top of settings. (On some Google Workspace accounts this tab is simply called "Accounts.") Scroll down to the section headed "Grant access to your account."

3. 3

   Click "Add another account"

   In the "Grant access to your account" section, click "Add another account." If you do not see this section at all on a work or school account, your administrator has not enabled mail delegation for your organization; skip ahead to the Workspace section below.

4. 4

   Verify that it is you

   Before letting you grant access, Google may ask you to confirm your identity, especially if you have 2-Step Verification turned on. Complete the prompt, entering your password or approving the sign-in on your phone, so Google knows you, the account owner, requested this change.

5. 5

   Enter the delegate's email address

   Type the full email address of the person you want to add as a delegate, then click "Next Step." For a personal account this is another Gmail address; for a Workspace account it must be someone in your same organization (more on that limit below).

6. 6

   Send the invitation

   Click "Send email to grant access." Gmail emails the person an invitation rather than switching it on instantly, because delegation requires the delegate's consent. Their address now appears in your settings list marked as pending until they accept.

After you send the invitation, two waiting periods come into play, and knowing about them up front saves a lot of confused refreshing. First, the delegate has to accept. Google sends them an email with a subject along the lines of "[Your name] has granted you access to their Gmail account," containing a confirmation link they must click to accept. That invitation does not wait forever; if they ignore it, it expires after about a week, and you would have to send a fresh one. So tell the person to expect it and to actually click it, ideally checking spam if it does not appear, because nothing happens on your end until they do.

Second, even after they accept, delegation does not always switch on the instant they click. Google notes it can take up to 24 hours for delegate access to fully take effect. In practice it is often much faster, but if your assistant accepts and then cannot see your mailbox right away, this lag is the usual reason. It is not broken; it is propagating. Have them wait, fully sign out and back in, and try again later that day before you start troubleshooting.

You can repeat this process to add more than one delegate. A personal @gmail.com account supports up to 10 delegates, while a Google Workspace account supports far more, up to 25 delegates per user through the standard Gmail settings (administrators can provision larger numbers through other tools, but 25 is the practical self-service ceiling). For an executive with one or two assistants, or a small team sharing a mailbox, you will not come close to those limits. Each delegate you add goes through the same invite-and-accept handshake; there is no way to silently attach someone to your account without an invitation they have to confirm.

What can a Gmail delegate do, and what can they not do?

This is the question that should decide whether delegation is the right tool for you, so it deserves a careful answer rather than a vague one. A delegate gets meaningful power over your mail, enough to genuinely run your inbox, but Google deliberately walls off the things that would let a delegate take over your account or impersonate you privately. The split is not arbitrary; it traces a clean line between operating the mailbox (allowed) and controlling the account or pretending to be the owner (not allowed).

On the "can do" side, a delegate can read the messages in your inbox and your other folders, open and reply to threads, compose and send new messages from your address, delete messages, and manage mail housekeeping like archiving and applying labels. In short, they can do the everyday work of email on your behalf. That is what makes the feature useful: an assistant can actually clear your inbox, not just look at it.

On the "cannot do" side, the limits are just as important. A delegate cannot change your password, cannot change your account's security or recovery settings, and cannot use Google Chat or Hangouts as you. Crucially, they also cannot hide that they are the one acting: every message they send is labeled as sent by them on your behalf, so they can never quietly impersonate you to a recipient. The table below lays out the full split so you can see exactly where the boundary sits.

A few of those rows deserve emphasis because they catch people off guard. The first is deletion. Some owners assume a delegate can only read and reply, a safe, look-but-do-not-touch role, and are surprised that a delegate can delete messages outright. They can, and a deletion lands in your real Trash, not some sandbox. This is not a reason to avoid delegation, but it is a reason to delegate only to people you trust, and to remember that the feature has no built-in "read-only" mode. If you need someone to see your mail but never alter it, plain delegation will not give you that, and you would need a different approach.

The second is the inability to manage the delegate list. A delegate cannot add other delegates or remove themselves; only you, the owner, control who has access, from your own settings. That is a good security property, it means a delegate cannot quietly invite a friend, but it also means the responsibility for keeping the list current sits entirely with you. If an assistant leaves, you are the one who has to go in and revoke them; nobody else can, and nothing happens automatically.

The third is the chat exclusion. Delegation is strictly about email. Your delegate cannot send Google Chat messages as you, start or join your chats, or appear as you in any messaging surface. If your team's real need is shared conversations rather than shared email, delegation is the wrong tool entirely. It is a mailbox feature, full stop, and it stays inside the boundaries of Gmail mail.

How does a delegate accept and start using your account?

Once you have sent the invitation, the rest happens on the delegate's side, and it helps to know what they will see so you can guide them through it. The experience is intentionally simple, but it is unfamiliar to most people the first time, so a quick walkthrough prevents the "I don't see anything" confusion that often follows. The delegate does all of this from their own Google account, on a computer, never by logging into yours.

Here is what the delegate does to accept and then open your mailbox.

1. 1

   Open the invitation email

   The delegate looks in their own inbox for a message with a subject like "[Owner name] has granted you access to their Gmail account." If it is not there, they should check spam and promotions, since automated grant emails sometimes land outside the inbox.

2. 2

   Click the acceptance link

   Inside that email is a confirmation link to accept the delegation. They click it and confirm. This consent step is mandatory, you cannot force access onto someone, and the link expires after about a week if ignored.

3. 3

   Wait for access to propagate

   After accepting, the delegate may need to wait, up to 24 hours in the slowest cases, before your account becomes available to them. It is frequently quicker, but if nothing shows up immediately, waiting is the fix, not re-sending the invite.

4. 4

   Open the account switcher

   On the desktop web, the delegate clicks their own profile picture or initial in the top right corner of Gmail. A menu drops down listing the accounts they can access, and your delegated mailbox now appears there, typically shown with your address and a "delegated" note.

5. 5

   Select your delegated mailbox

   They click your account in that menu. Gmail opens your mailbox, usually in a new browser tab, and they can now read, reply, send, and manage your mail from within their own logged-in session, no password required.

The mental model worth giving your delegate is that they are not logging in as you; they are switching into your mailbox from inside their own account. They stay signed in as themselves the entire time. Gmail simply lets them open your inbox in a separate tab or view, and they move between their mail and yours through that same profile menu in the corner. There is no second password to remember and no shared credential floating around, which is precisely the point of the feature.

It also means the delegate's own security protects the access. Because they reach your mailbox through their personal account, their password and their two-step verification are what guard the door. That is part of why delegating to a trusted colleague with a well-secured account is genuinely safer than the alternative people often resort to, sharing the actual password, which spreads a single credential around and leaves no record of who did what. With delegation, the access is named, individual, and revocable.

If you have added several delegates to a shared mailbox, each of them goes through this same acceptance and then sees the shared account in their own switcher. They are all working the same live mailbox, so a message one of them reads or archives is read or archived for everyone. That shared-live-state is exactly what you want for a small team covering one address, and also exactly where the limits start to show once the team grows, since basic delegation has no notion of "this one is mine to handle," a gap we will come back to.

How does the "sent on behalf of" line work?

When a delegate sends a message from your account, Gmail does not let them masquerade as you with no trace. Instead, it attaches sender information that openly identifies the delegate as the person who actually sent it, while still showing your address as the account it came from. This is one of the most important things to understand about delegation, both because it surprises people and because it is, on balance, a feature rather than a flaw.

Mechanically, the message carries your name and address as the sending account, but the headers also record the delegate's address as the one who performed the send. Many mail clients surface this to the recipient as something like "Your Name (sent by delegate@example.com)," so the person receiving it can see that your assistant, not you personally, composed and sent the reply. Exactly how it is displayed depends on the recipient's email program, some show it prominently, some tuck it into the message details, but the underlying record is always there. There is no setting to suppress it; transparency is built into the feature on purpose.

For most delegation use cases this is exactly right. When an EA replies on an executive's behalf, it is honest and usually helpful for the recipient to know they are corresponding with the assistant, it sets the right expectations and keeps the audit trail clean. The same goes for a shared support mailbox: seeing which team member actually answered is useful, not a problem. The cases where the "sent by" line causes friction are the ones where you wanted seamless impersonation, where the recipient should believe the owner personally typed every word. Delegation deliberately does not support that, and if it is what you need, delegation is not your tool.

How is delegation different on personal Gmail versus Google Workspace?

Delegation works on both a free personal @gmail.com account and a paid Google Workspace (work or school) account, and the day-to-day experience is nearly identical, you add delegates from the same "Grant access to your account" section, and they accept and switch in the same way. But there are real differences in limits, in who is allowed to be a delegate, and, most importantly, in whether the feature is even available, that you need to know before you rely on it.

The biggest difference is the administrator gate on Workspace. On a personal account, delegation is simply available; you go to settings and use it. On a Workspace account, whether you can delegate at all is controlled by your organization's administrator. If your admin has not enabled mail delegation for your domain (or for your specific department), the "Grant access to your account" section will not appear in your settings, and there is nothing you can do from your end to make it show up. You would have to ask your IT administrator to turn it on. This is the single most common reason a Workspace user follows a guide like this one and finds the option missing.

The second difference is who can be a delegate. On a personal account, you can delegate to other Gmail addresses. On Workspace, you can generally only delegate to another user inside your own organization, regardless of which domain or department they are in. You cannot, through standard Gmail delegation, hand a Workspace mailbox to someone outside your company or to a random personal Gmail address. That restriction is deliberate; it keeps company mail inside the company. So a Workspace executive delegating to an in-house assistant works perfectly, while a Workspace user trying to delegate to an external contractor's personal Gmail will hit a wall.

The differences in delegate count are smaller but worth noting. A personal @gmail.com account supports up to 10 delegates, which is far more than any individual realistically needs. A Workspace user can have up to 25 delegates through the standard self-service settings, with administrators able to provision more through management tools when an organization genuinely needs it. For ordinary use, an executive plus a couple of assistants, or a handful of people on a shared address, neither limit will ever bind.

For administrators, the relevant control lives in the Google Admin console, under the Gmail user settings, in a section called "Mail delegation." There an admin can check the box that lets users delegate access to their mailbox to other users in the domain, and can scope it to the whole organization or only to particular organizational units, so a company can, for example, allow delegation for the executive team while leaving it off elsewhere. Admins also have a related, more powerful capability: they can delegate a user's mailbox to someone else directly from the Admin console, which is how IT typically grants a manager access to a departed employee's mail without the former employee needing to do anything. That admin-driven delegation is a separate path from the self-service flow this guide focuses on, but it is worth knowing it exists.

If you administer a Workspace domain and your users are asking why they cannot find delegation, the fix is almost always flipping that one "Mail delegation" setting on for the right organizational units. And if you are an end user on Workspace who hit the wall, the practical move is to send your IT team a short, specific request: ask them to enable mail delegation for your account or department in the Admin console, and mention that it is the setting under Apps, Gmail, user settings, so they know exactly where to look.

How do you remove a delegate from your Gmail account?

Removing a delegate is as important as adding one, and it is just as quick, but it is something only you, the owner, can do, and only you will remember to do it. When an assistant changes roles, a teammate leaves the support rotation, or you simply no longer need someone in your mailbox, you should revoke their access promptly. Stale delegates are a quiet security risk: access that outlives its purpose is access waiting to be misused or forgotten, so treat removal as a routine part of any offboarding.

Here is how to remove a delegate on the desktop web.

1. 1

   Open Accounts and Import in settings

   On a computer, open Gmail, click the gear icon, choose "See all settings," and go to the "Accounts and Import" tab (or "Accounts" on some Workspace accounts). As with adding, removal is web-only; you cannot do it from the mobile app.

2. 2

   Find the Grant access section

   Scroll to "Grant access to your account." You will see every delegate currently on your account listed there, along with anyone whose invitation is still pending acceptance.

3. 3

   Click "delete" next to the delegate

   Next to the address you want to remove, click the "delete" link. Gmail asks you to confirm, since this immediately cuts off that person's access to your mailbox.

4. 4

   Confirm the removal

   Confirm, and the delegate is revoked. They can no longer open your mailbox from their account switcher. The change takes effect right away, so a removed delegate loses access promptly rather than after a long delay.

5. 5

   Review the full list while you are there

   Before you leave settings, scan the remaining entries to make sure everyone listed still belongs. Periodically auditing this list, especially after staff changes, is the single best habit for keeping delegated access tidy and safe.

Two points are worth underlining about removal. First, because only the owner can remove a delegate, there is no way for the situation to clean itself up. If you forget, the access simply persists. That is why tying delegate removal to your offboarding routine, alongside collecting a laptop or disabling a building badge, matters: nothing else will trigger it. For shared mailboxes, where several delegates come and go over time, it pays to review the list on a set cadence, say quarterly, rather than only when someone happens to remember.

Second, removal is clean and immediate but it is not retroactive. Revoking a delegate stops all future access, but it does not undo anything they already did, any mail they sent on your behalf was genuinely sent, and any messages they deleted are in Trash (recoverable for a window, then gone). So removal is about closing the door going forward, not rewinding history. If you are revoking access because something went wrong rather than as routine offboarding, pair the removal with a look through your Sent folder and Trash to see what happened, and, if you have any doubt about the account's safety, change your password too, since that is the one thing a delegate never had.

Can you use Gmail delegation on your phone?

This is where Gmail delegation has long disappointed people, and it is worth being straight about it. For most of its history, delegation has been a desktop-web feature through and through. You can only set up and manage delegates on the web, that part has not changed, and for years delegates also could not open a delegated mailbox from the Gmail mobile apps at all. If you wanted to work someone else's inbox, you sat at a computer. That limitation is the source of a great deal of frustration for assistants who live on their phones.

More recently, Google has been rolling out the ability to access a delegated account from the Gmail app on Android, iPhone, and iPad. The catch is that this rollout has been gradual and uneven: it reaches some accounts before others, it can behave differently across devices, and it is not something you can count on being present for a given user at a given time. So the honest, durable answer is that mobile delegation support is inconsistent. It may work for your delegate today, it may not appear for them at all, and you should not architect a workflow around it being reliably available everywhere.

What is firmly true is the management side: you cannot add, accept, or remove delegates from a phone. Sending the invitation, accepting it as the delegate, and revoking access are all desktop-web actions, with no mobile equivalent. So even in the best case where a delegate can open the mailbox on their phone, the setup and teardown still happen on a computer. For an assistant who needs to handle an executive's mail fluidly from anywhere, on a laptop, a tablet, and a phone, all day, this patchwork is exactly the kind of friction that pushes teams toward a tool built for the job rather than a feature bolted onto consumer Gmail.

• Setup is desktop-only: adding a delegate, accepting the invite, and removing a delegate all require the web; there is no way to manage delegation from the Gmail mobile app.
• Mobile access for delegates is rolling out but inconsistent: opening a delegated mailbox in the Gmail app on Android, iPhone, or iPad may or may not be available to a given account.
• Do not build a mobile-first workflow on it: if your assistant must work your inbox from a phone reliably, treat consumer Gmail delegation as a desktop tool and plan accordingly.
• The web experience is the dependable one: switching into a delegated mailbox through the profile menu on a computer works consistently and is where delegates should expect to do the bulk of the work.

What security considerations come with delegating Gmail access?

Delegation is far safer than the thing people do instead, which is sharing a password, but it is not consequence-free, and a few minutes of thought before you grant access will save you trouble later. The core principle is simple: a delegate can do real damage to your mail if they turn out to be careless or malicious, because the feature has no read-only mode and no per-action approval. Reading, sending, and deleting are all on the table the moment you grant access. So the trust you extend should match that power.

Start with who you delegate to. Because access flows through the delegate's own Google account, the security of your mailbox is now partly the security of their account. A delegate with a weak password and no two-step verification is a back door into your mail, so it is reasonable to expect, or for a Workspace admin to require, that anyone holding delegate access has strong account security of their own. Delegate to named individuals you trust, never to a generic shared login, and keep the list as short as the work actually requires.

Then think about the boundary the feature gives you, and the boundary it does not. The reassuring part is that a delegate can never touch your password, your recovery settings, or your two-step verification, so they cannot lock you out or seize the account, and they can never send mail that hides their identity. The part to stay alert to is that within the mailbox they have broad latitude, including deleting messages, and that you are the only person who can revoke them. Combine those facts into a simple operating discipline, summarized in the callout below, and delegation stays a safe, useful tool rather than a lurking liability.

It is also worth setting expectations about visibility. Standard Gmail delegation gives you, the owner, no rich activity log of what each delegate did, no dashboard of "delegate X read these, deleted those." You can see your own Sent folder (which will contain messages your delegates sent, marked accordingly) and your Trash, but there is no built-in per-delegate audit trail in a personal account. Workspace administrators have more visibility through audit logs at the organization level, but an individual owner largely operates on trust plus the ordinary contents of their mailbox. If accountability and a clear record of who-did-what is important to you, that gap is a real limitation of the consumer feature.

Finally, keep delegation scoped to its purpose. The temptation, especially with a capable assistant, is to leave access in place indefinitely "just in case." Resist standing access that no current task requires. The cleanest posture is to grant delegation when there is a clear, ongoing need, keep the delegate list reviewed and current, and revoke promptly when the need ends. Access that maps tightly to actual responsibilities is access that is easy to reason about, and easy to reason about is most of what good email security comes down to.

Why is Gmail delegation not working? (troubleshooting)

When delegation does not behave, the cause is almost always one of a small set of predictable issues, and each has a clear fix. Before concluding that something is broken, run through the list below; in nearly every case a setting, a permission, or simple timing explains it. The recurring theme is that delegation is a deliberate, consent-based, web-only feature with an admin gate on Workspace, so most problems trace back to one of those facts.

• There is no "Grant access to your account" section: on a Workspace account, your administrator has not enabled mail delegation. Ask IT to turn on "Mail delegation" for your organizational unit in the Admin console; you cannot enable it yourself.
• The delegate cannot see your mailbox yet: they may not have accepted, or access is still propagating. Confirm they clicked the acceptance link (check their spam), then allow up to 24 hours and have them sign out and back in.
• The invitation never arrived: it may be in the delegate's spam or promotions, or it expired after about a week. Have them search their mail for the grant email, and if it is gone, send a fresh invitation from your settings.
• You are trying to set it up on your phone: delegation cannot be added, accepted, or removed from the Gmail mobile app. Use the desktop web for all delegate management.
• You cannot add an external or non-Gmail address: on Workspace you can generally only delegate to users inside your own organization, and personal accounts delegate to Gmail addresses. Cross-organization or non-Gmail delegation is not supported.
• The delegate cannot open the mailbox in the mobile app: mobile access for delegates is rolling out unevenly and may not be available to that account. Have them use the desktop web, which works reliably.
• You hit a limit adding delegates: a personal account allows up to 10 delegates and a Workspace user up to 25 through settings. Remove someone no longer needed, or have an admin provision more on Workspace if genuinely required.
• Identity verification keeps interrupting: with 2-Step Verification on, Google may ask you to confirm it is you before granting access. Complete the prompt; this is expected and protects the account.

How does AI Emaily go beyond Gmail delegation across every account?

Everything above is the manual reality of Gmail delegation: a useful, password-safe way to let one trusted person operate one Gmail account, set up on the desktop web, with an admin gate on Workspace, no read-only mode, no real audit trail, and a mobile story that is still patchy. It does its job for the classic executive-assistant and small shared-mailbox cases. But it was designed for one specific shape of help, a human colleague inside your same Google organization, working one inbox, and it strains the moment your needs are bigger than that.

AI Emaily is built for the way people and teams actually share email today. It is an autonomous AI email client where delegation is a first-class idea rather than a buried setting, and where you can delegate a piece of your inbox to either a teammate or the AI agent itself. That second option is the real shift: instead of every email waiting on a human, you can hand routine triage, drafting, sorting, and follow-up to an agent that works your inbox the way a great assistant would, and reserve the human delegates for the judgment calls. The same model that lets you assign a thread to a colleague lets you assign it to the agent.

It is also genuinely built for teams and shared inboxes. Where Gmail delegation drops several people into one live mailbox with no sense of ownership, so two delegates can unknowingly answer the same email, AI Emaily gives a shared inbox the structure that consumer delegation lacks: you can assign individual conversations to a specific teammate or to the agent, see who is handling what, and avoid the collisions and dropped balls that plague a raw shared mailbox. A small team running support@ or sales@ gets a real collaborative workspace, not just shared read-and-reply.

The part that matters most if your email life spans more than one address is that AI Emaily works across every provider, not just Gmail. Gmail delegation only ever covers Gmail accounts inside the same organization; the instant you add an Outlook address, a second Workspace domain, or any non-Google mailbox, it cannot help you. AI Emaily connects Gmail, Outlook, and the rest into one unified workspace and lets you delegate, to people or to the agent, consistently across all of them. There is no admin gate to wait on, no same-organization restriction, and no desktop-only ceiling; the delegation model is the same everywhere you have mail.

And it is designed around the control and accountability that bare Gmail delegation is missing. AI Emaily runs in Manual, Copilot, or Autopilot, so you decide whether the agent merely suggests and waits for approval, or handles routine mail on its own once you trust it, and human delegates can be held to the same approval step before anything sends. Every action, by a person or the agent, is logged with one-tap undo, giving you the clear who-did-what record and the safety net that consumer delegation never provides. The free plan is $0 to start; Pro is $17.99 a month billed annually for a single power user, and Team is $22.99 per seat a month billed annually for shared inboxes and teammate-or-agent delegation across a group. You can connect an account and try it in a few minutes at app.aiemaily.com/signup.

Putting it all together

Gmail delegation is a quietly powerful feature once you know its shape. You grant access on the desktop web, under Settings, then Accounts and Import, in the "Grant access to your account" section; you add the person's email and they accept an invitation, after which they can read, send, and delete your mail from inside their own account, no password ever shared. The boundaries are clean: a delegate operates your mailbox but cannot change your password, alter your security settings, use chat as you, or send mail that hides who they are, since everything they send is stamped as sent on your behalf.

Keep the practical caveats in mind and it stays smooth. On Workspace, the feature only appears if an administrator has enabled mail delegation, and you can generally only delegate within your own organization. Setup, acceptance, and removal are all desktop-web actions; mobile access for delegates exists but is rolling out unevenly, so do not lean on it. There is no read-only mode and no built-in audit trail, so delegate only to trusted people, expect that they can delete as well as read, and revoke access promptly when it is no longer needed, because you are the only one who can.

For a single executive and one assistant, or two people sharing a mailbox, that is often all you need. When the picture gets larger, more accounts than one Gmail, a real team sharing an inbox, a need for clear ownership and an audit trail, or the wish to hand routine work to software rather than only to a person, the manual feature starts to show its edges. That is the gap an AI email client is built to close: delegation that works the same across every provider, that lets you assign mail to a teammate or to an AI agent, and that keeps a clean, reversible record of who did what, so the right person, or the right agent, handles each message and nothing falls through.