What Gmail delegation is
Gmail delegation is the built-in way to let another person read and answer a mailbox without giving them the password. The owner grants access from their settings. The delegate then opens that mailbox from their own Google account, right next to their usual inbox.
That solves a real problem. Sharing a password is risky, and it breaks things: a provider can block the account when it sees logins from several places at once, and every departure forces a password change for everyone. We covered that trap in how to share a mailbox without sharing the password. Delegation avoids all of it. Each person keeps their own login, and access can be revoked in one click.
So delegation is genuinely useful. The question is not whether it works. It is how far it holds once several people answer the same address every day.
Setting it up in two minutes
On the account you want to share, open Gmail settings, go to the “Accounts and Import” tab, then “Grant access to your account”. Add the delegate’s email address. Google sends them an invitation they have to accept. One classic trap: the invitation expires after a week. If your colleague lets it sit, you start over.
Once the invitation is accepted, the delegate clicks their profile picture in Gmail and picks the delegated mailbox. It opens in a separate tab. Nothing to install, no server configuration.
Two details matter for a team.
First, on Google Workspace (a work or school account), your administrator has to allow delegation. And if the admin ever switches it off, every existing delegation stops working at once.
Second, what your recipients see. On a personal account, a message sent by a delegate shows the delegate’s address. On Workspace, the admin decides: show the delegate’s address, or only the account owner’s.
The official limits
These numbers are checked against Google’s documentation (July 2026).
- A personal Gmail account allows up to 10 delegates.
- A work or school account allows up to 1,000 delegates. The limit was 25 until January 2021.
- About 40 delegates can access the account at the same time, and heavy or automated use lowers that number further.
- A delegate can read, send, and delete messages. They cannot chat on the owner’s behalf or change the password.
For three people on contact@, none of these ceilings is a problem. You will never reach 10 delegates. Which is exactly why the real limits are somewhere else.
Where it stops for a team
Delegation shares access. It does not share the work. The difference shows within the first week.
Take a three-person repair shop handling quote requests on contact@. Everyone has delegation, everyone sees everything. On paper, problem solved. In practice, four things are missing.
Nobody owns a message. Every delegate sees the same inbox. A customer writes: who answers? Whoever opens it first, or nobody. Delegation has no way to assign a conversation to someone.
Read means nothing. Behind all those delegate tabs there is only one mailbox, so when one of you opens a message, it shows as read for everyone. Your colleague sees a read email and assumes it is handled. Maybe it was just opened on a phone between two meetings.
The Sent folder becomes your audit tool. To find out whether someone already replied to Mrs. Martin, you dig through Sent. Ten times a day, that gets old fast. Duplicate replies to the same customer, each with a slightly different answer, are born right there.
No internal notes, no status. You cannot write “waiting on the supplier, follow up Thursday” on a conversation. So the context lives elsewhere: a forwarded copy or a WhatsApp message. And there is no done state. The inbox stays one long list where handled and pending look the same.
None of this is a design flaw. Delegation was built for a precise scenario: an assistant managing an executive’s mailbox. One owner, one or two delegates, and decisions made out loud. At that scale, it is exactly the right tool.
An honest decision rule
Keep delegation when one person’s mailbox needs cover from another. An assistant on the director’s email, or a colleague taking over during vacation: it works, and it is already included in Gmail.
Change your approach the day a common address (contact@ or office@) is handled by two or three people daily. At that point the problem is no longer access but coordination: knowing who takes what, and what is still waiting for an answer. Delegation answers neither question. The tool Google offers for that case is a different one anyway: Groups with a Collaborative Inbox, which comes with trade-offs of its own. We compared the options in Google Workspace as a shared inbox for a small team.
The missing team layer
With Trupeo, you keep the Gmail mailbox and add the coordination on top. You connect the existing address, and everyone signs in with their own account, just like with delegation. But each conversation can be assigned to one owner, marked open or done, and annotated internally without the customer seeing anything. The “did someone already reply?” question disappears: the answer sits on the conversation itself.
If your team has reached the two-or-three-people-on-contact@ stage, start with our complete shared inbox guide, then have a look at our pricing: a simple price, built for small structures.
Sources:
- Delegate & collaborate on email (Gmail Help): the setup steps, the 10 and 1,000 delegate limits, what a delegate can and cannot do, and the one-week invitation expiry.
- Let users delegate access to a Gmail account (Google Workspace Admin Help): admin-side enablement, the roughly 40 concurrent delegates, and the choice of which sender address is shown.
- Expanding the Gmail delegate limit (Google Workspace Updates): the January 2021 increase from 25 to 1,000 configured delegates.