Ultimate Email Delegation
Most email clients are not assistant friendly. Delegating emails and calendars without the risks associated with sharing passwords or the hassle of creating semi-efficient workarounds can quickly take a toll.
With Missive, email delegation is easy and secure. You decide to whom and what to delegate, the type of access, and actions permitted. All without sharing credentials. Also, one of our core features is the ability to have chat conversations inside emails.
We have compiled the best three use-cases and configurations real Missive users have implemented.
For practical purposes, we will use the following terminology throughout the post:
Full email delegation
The assistant can see all emails, do all actions, reply as the owner.
With full email delegation, the assistant has access to all emails and can perform all actions, which includes reply as the email owner, archive, delete, create labels to triage and prioritize emails. Calendar accounts can also be shared, allowing them to create, respond to and manage events.
This is useful for assistants that have a lot of experience and have been working with the organization for a while. They know what is important and what isn’t. A high degree of confidence and competence is vital for this type of delegation.
Here all emails from the owner's account (ceo@acme.com) arrive in the Team Inbox. When choosing Team Inbox, new messages appear in the Team Inbox instead of the Inbox. The team inbox is shared among its team members, meaning that whenever a message is assigned/archived/closed, it will be removed from the Team Inbox for both assistant and owner.
Assistants can be made members of the team, and owners can be observers, these don't get notified of new emails, but they can keep an eye on everything at all times.
The assistant can reply as the owner of the account (ceo@acme.com). Also, a custom signature can be created.
Assistants can also triage emails by creating color-coded shared labels.
The owner can pin labels to the sidebar to quickly access emails that need their response.
Pro tipIn the sidebar, do a right-click on a label and click on Show if unread. The label will be hidden until there are unread messages. This can help you keep a clutter-free screen.
Manual triage-only delegation
The assistant can see all emails but cannot respond as the owner.
Similar to the case above, all email arrives in a Team Inbox but through a shared address.
The big difference is the shared addresses nature. In this configuration, the assistant can see all incoming emails but cannot reply as the owner (ceo@acme.com), only as themself (assistant@acme.com).
The assistant can also create an assortment of color-coded shared labels.
The owner can quickly scope top priority emails, for example, by clicking on the sidebar's label.
Privacy-first delegation
The assistant cannot see all emails and cannot reply as the owner.
In this case, the owner imports a private account. Here, email sharing is done automatically through rules. This modality of delegation is essential when the content of some emails is private and can’t be seen by the assistant.
The owner (ceo@acme.com) can create rules to share only some emails with the assistant (assistant@acme.com) and keep the rest private.
In the next example, a rule is set to keep all family/friends/finance related emails from going to the assistant's inbox.
Actions such as removing a conversation from the owner's inbox can also be achieved with rules. For instance, when the assistant labels an email as "Non-essential", the rule will close the conversation, removing it from the owner's inbox, keeping it tidy.
Pro tipIf a private email needs to be delegated, a simple @mention to the assistant can grant temporary access to it, it can be removed in the future.
It's also possible to let the assistant reply as the owner and any other alias they own.
To achieve this. Open Account settings > Select a personal account > Edit alias > Allow others to send emails from this alias.
You will always have access to all emails sent by a delegated user.
To enhance your email delegation workflow, you may want to consider utilizing the best AI email assistant to master your inbox in Missive.
Notes.
Remember that there's a copy of emails in your email service provider (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) This means that if the assistant mistakenly discards emails, you can still retrieve them in the trash.
Always test to make sure everything works, and emails are only read by the intended user(s). When in doubt, contact us, we’ll be happy to help.
We hope this post can help you delegate more efficiently and securely. And like Jane and Annie, stop working apart, start working as a team.
