Gmail delegate access: reading a colleague's mail without their password

Someone goes on leave and their inbox still has to be answered. A founder wants an assistant handling replies without handing over a password. A support address is really one person's mailbox that three people need to see. In all three cases the same shortcut gets suggested first, which is to share the password, and in all three cases Gmail already has a supported feature that does the job without it.

Delegate access has existed for years and is still poorly understood, mostly because the interesting part is not what it allows. It is what it withholds. A delegate gets a smaller account than the owner does, and the gaps are specific enough that planning around them matters more than the setup itself.

What delegation actually grants

Google's definition is one sentence:

A delegate is someone who can read, send, and delete emails in your account for you. Source: support.google.com

Three verbs, and nothing about credentials. The delegate signs in as themselves, then opens the other mailbox from their own account. No password changes hands, and no second set of two-step verification codes has to be shared, which is the whole reason the feature exists.

Sending is where delegation is most visibly different from a shared password. Google states that "when a delegate sends a message from your account, their email address appears." The recipient can see who actually pressed send. For an assistant answering on behalf of an executive that is usually correct behaviour rather than a leak, but it does rule out delegation as a way to make mail look as though it came from the owner personally.

The numbers are worth writing down before designing anything around the feature. A personal account can add up to 10 delegates. A work or school account can add up to 1,000. That difference is large enough that a plan built on a personal Gmail address will hit a wall a Workspace account never notices.

What a delegate cannot do

The short version Google gives is that "a delegate can't chat with anyone or change your password." The longer version is a list, and reading it before setup prevents most of the surprises.

A delegate working inside someone else's mailbox does not get Google Account settings, Drive attachments, Google Photos, Tasks, autocomplete, autocorrect, client-side encryption, emoji reactions, Gemini features, Meet, Smart Compose, Smart Reply, or spelling and grammar checks. On mobile, background sync and conversation summaries are also absent.

Two of those matter more than the rest.

Autocomplete is the one that gets noticed within an hour. Google Workspace documentation states plainly that "autocomplete isn't available to delegated users when using the Gmail search bar in the delegated account." Anyone used to typing three letters of a colleague's name and picking the address from a list will type full addresses instead, and will misspell some of them.

Drive attachments are the other. A message whose attachment lives in Drive rather than in the mail itself will not open for a delegate unless that file has been shared with the delegate separately. Delegation covers mail, not the storage mail points at, and nothing in the Gmail interface explains the difference at the moment it bites.

There is also a quieter limit that only shows up under load. Google states that "delegation does not increase the limits for a Gmail account," and that accounts with delegates keep "the standard Gmail account limits and policies." Five people answering from one mailbox share one account's sending limits between them.

Setting it up, and the 24 hours nobody plans for

The owner grants access from their own Gmail settings, under the accounts section, by adding the delegate's address. The delegate accepts, and from then on the mailbox appears in their own account switcher.

The detail that breaks handovers is timing:

It can take up to 24 hours before a delegate can use your account. Source: support.google.com

Granting delegation on the last afternoon before a holiday is therefore not a plan. The propagation window means delegation has to be set up a day early, and tested by the delegate, not assumed.

Mobile access has its own history. Delegated mailboxes were a desktop feature for a long time, and Google announced support for working with delegated accounts from mobile devices in a Workspace update dated 30 June 2026. The Gmail help page now documents the Android route alongside the computer one, so the honest answer to whether delegation works on a phone depends on how recently the question was last checked.

Why a shared password is worse than it looks

The reason to prefer delegation is not policy language. It is what happens on the day the arrangement ends. A shared password has to be changed when anyone leaves, and every remaining person has to be told the new one, which is how passwords end up in chat histories and in notes apps. Two-step verification makes it worse rather than better, because the codes arrive on one person's phone and that person becomes a bottleneck for everyone else.

Delegation ends differently. Removing a delegate is one line in the owner's settings, nothing else changes, and the people who kept access never had to know a credential in the first place. The audit story is also cleaner, since mail sent by a delegate carries the delegate's address rather than looking identical to mail the owner sent.

The limits an administrator controls

Inside an organisation, several parts of delegation are not the mailbox owner's decision at all.

What is limited	The documented limit
Delegates per mailbox	"A single Gmail account supports up to 1,000 unique delegates"
Delegates working at the same time	"With typical use, 40 delegated users can access a Gmail account at the same time"
Who can be a delegate	Only a user "in the same organization, regardless of their domain or their organizational unit"
Delegating to a group	Requires the setting allowing mailbox access to be granted to a Google group, enabled for the mailbox owner's unit and for each group member's unit

The organisation boundary is the one that ends projects. Google Workspace documentation states that "users can only delegate access to another user in the same organization, regardless of their domain or their organizational unit." A client cannot delegate their mailbox to an agency, and a contractor on their own domain cannot be given delegate access to a customer's inbox. Multiple domains inside one Workspace account are fine. Two separate Workspace accounts are not.

The concurrency figure is also worth reading carefully. Forty simultaneous delegates is generous for a team and tight for an automated system, and Google notes that automated processes and APIs hitting the mailbox frequently reduce how many people can be in at once. A delegated mailbox that also has a scripted integration reading it is sharing that budget.

When delegation looks broken but is not

Three checks resolve most reports that delegation is not working. The first is time, since the mailbox can take up to 24 hours to appear for a new delegate. The second is which account the delegate is signed in as, because the delegated mailbox appears inside the delegate's own account switcher and is invisible from any other account they hold. The third, in a company, is whether an administrator has delegation turned on at all for the organisational unit the mailbox belongs to, which is a setting the mailbox owner cannot see and cannot change.

A fourth cause is subtler. If the delegated mailbox was granted to a Google group rather than to individuals, the setting allowing mailbox access to be granted to a group has to be enabled both for the mailbox owner's unit and for each member's unit. Half-enabled, it fails silently for some members and works for others, which reads as a bug and is actually configuration.

Delegation compared with the other ways to share a mailbox

Delegation is one of four arrangements that get chosen for the same problem, and they fail in different places.

Approach	Who signs in	What breaks
Delegate access	Each person as themselves	Mail only. Same organisation only. No Drive attachments, no autocomplete in the delegated mailbox
Shared password	Everyone as the mailbox	Two-step verification, audit trail and offboarding all become manual problems
Google group as a Collaborative Inbox	Each person as themselves	A new address, not the existing mailbox. Forwarding and Cc from a Collaborative Inbox is capped at "25 email addresses per message"
Third-party shared inbox tool	Each person as themselves	Another subscription, and mail lives in a second system

Delegation wins whenever the requirement is literally "this existing address, covered by these named people, inside this company." The Collaborative Inbox route wins when a new team address is acceptable and assignment features matter, since group members with the right permission can take a conversation or mark it complete. Neither fixes the case of two organisations, which needs forwarding or a genuine third-party tool.

Working a delegated mailbox on a Mac without switching all day

Once delegation is on, the daily reality is not a permissions problem. It is a navigation problem.

A delegated mailbox opens as a separate Gmail view reached through the account switcher, which means the person covering it is now moving between their own mail and someone else's inside one browser session. Every trip costs a menu, a reload, and a moment of working out which mailbox is on screen. The two views look nearly identical, which is how a reply intended for the covered mailbox goes out from the personal one.

Two habits reduce that cost without any extra software. Keep the delegated mailbox in a window that is never used for anything else, and change something visible about it, since browsers let a zoom level or a theme distinguish otherwise identical windows.

The structural version of the same idea is to stop treating the two mailboxes as views of one session. A browser that keeps each web app in its own window gives the delegated mailbox its own window, its own name in Command-Tab, and its own cookie store, so nothing is ever one click away from being sent by the wrong identity. Anyone covering two or three mailboxes during a colleague's leave gets the clearest benefit, because workspaces can be arranged per mailbox rather than per tab, and a look at the supported apps shows which of the surrounding tools behave the same way.

The trade-off stays honest. Delegation itself is free and already present in Gmail. A separate window per mailbox is a working habit, and a dedicated application is worth it only for someone who does this every day rather than for one week a year.

What to change first

Set delegation up a full day before it is needed, and have the delegate confirm they can actually open the mailbox before the owner leaves. Then decide where the delegated mailbox lives on screen, because a mailbox with its own window and its own icon is the difference between covering for a colleague and sending as the wrong person, which is the problem SpaceDeck exists to remove.