It is best practice for employees to generally send mail from their own work account. This provides better accountability and communications. For example, if an email advertising a new feature or service comes from sales@acmedistributors.com, the recipient may not know who to call or talk to about details–especially if the sales email address is shared by many people. But if it comes from a single person, like wiley@acmedistributed.com, it’s much more likely for the recipient to respond directly to Wiley asking for pricing and terms.

However, there are some times when a business needs an employee to send emails on behalf of someone else. This is known as “Delegation.” Often delegation is used to manage a sales agents correspondence while they are on vacation or some other sort of leave. Or it can be used for admin staff to send out invitations to a customer appreciation event on behalf of the CEO.

Using delegation, one employee (perhaps the CEO, Vice-President, or a manager) delegates their trust to another employee to send mail on their behalf. However, for security reasons they should never allow another employee to have their email password or direct access to their account. By using delegation, the manager can revoke this delegated permission at any time and does not need to worry about their account being co-opted or misused by the delegate.

Google Workspace makes e-mail delegation very easy. It involves 2 steps:

1. The Delegator must log into their account and authorize another employee to be their delegate.
2. The Delegate must log into their account and accept the delegation.

This process must be done quickly, usually within a week, or the delegation request will expire. Once the delegation is in place, the Delegate has a switch by which they can send mail from their own account or on behalf of the Delegator. For a quick and informative video on how to set up Email Delegation in Google Workspace, watch this video (It’s about 8 minutes long and who doesn’t love a narrator with an Irish accent):