How to Delegate Access to a Google Workspace Users Email, Give Admin Access of Gmail 2026 Easily

From the Admin Console, open Apps, then Google Workspace, which expands into a full list of Google services: Calendar, Cloud Search, Drive and Docs, Gmail, Google Chat, and more. Click Gmail to reach its settings. Delegation is not under Security or Account, which is where people tend to look first for a permissions setting like this.

Gmail's User Settings page lists a row of toggles: Mail delegation, Name format, Gmail web offline, Confidential mode, Smart compose personalisation, and others. Mail delegation is described plainly right there: "Let users delegate access to their mailbox to other users in the domain," and by default it shows OFF, applied at whichever organizational unit you're currently viewing. Until it's turned on here, individual users won't have the option to add a delegate from their own Gmail settings at all.

Clicking to edit Mail delegation expands a checkbox: "Let users delegate access to their mailbox to other users in the domain," plus a note that existing delegations are turned off, not deleted, if you disable the feature later. Below that sits the sender information setting, which controls what a recipient sees when a delegate sends mail on someone else's behalf: either the account owner's name and the delegate who actually sent it, or the account owner's name alone.

A separate checkbox lets individual users override that display preference for themselves instead of being locked to the org-wide default. Google Workspace also has a second checkbox here, "Allow users to grant their mailbox access to a Google group," which delegates an entire group at once instead of one person at a time. It only works when the setting is enabled for both the mailbox owner's organizational unit and each group member's unit.

Every setting on this page is scoped to an organizational unit, shown on the left as a tree starting from the top-level domain and branching into any sub-units you've created. Turning on delegation at the top level applies it to everyone.

Turning it on for a specific unit, such as an executive team or a support group, limits it to those accounts. Decide the scope before saving; a domain-wide change affects every mailbox in the organization, and Google notes it can take up to 24 hours to fully propagate, though it's usually faster.

Once the admin-level toggle is on, each user adds a delegate from inside their own Gmail: under Settings, the Accounts tab (labeled Accounts and Import in some layouts) has a "Grant access to your account" section where they enter the delegate's email address and send the invitation. The delegate gets a confirmation email, valid for a week, and once accepted can read, send, and organize mail from that inbox using their own login.

No password changes hands. Google Workspace mailboxes can carry up to 1,000 delegates, well above what most teams need, but recommends keeping simultaneous access to around 40 people so performance doesn't suffer. A personal @gmail.com account, by comparison, is capped at 10 delegates and never needs this admin step at all, since the toggle only governs Workspace-managed domains.

A delegate can act inside the mailbox: draft and send messages, archive, label, and search. Delegation is not the same as admin access to the account.

Delegates can't change the account's password, security settings, or recovery options, and they can't use the owner's Chat, Meet, or Smart Compose. Mail sent on someone's behalf is labeled according to the sender information setting from step three. That distinction matters for the "give admin access" framing some people search for: delegation shares inbox management, not account control.