14 DAY TRIAL // Gmail just added a new feature that should come in very handy in a couple of cases. With email delegation, you can enable other Gmail users to access your email account as well as read and respond to messages. This also works great if you have more than one account that you'd want to follow, but don't want to sign in and out all the time.
"Checking these two different accounts used to mean I had to sign out and back in to Gmail all the time. Not anymore," Hari Nidumolu, Software Engineer at Google, writes.
"Instead, I can grant my personal account access to my shared family account and view, organize and send mail on behalf of our shared account," he announced.
"We've offered email delegation for Google Apps accounts for a while — it's super useful for people who want their assistants to have access to read or respond to mail on their behalf. Now this functionality is available for anyone using Gmail," he explained.
The new feature is available in the Settings section of Gmail. Under the Accounts and Import tab you'll notice the "Grant access to your account" option.
All you need to do is supply the email of the account you want to enable access to your email. Of course, you can revoke access at any point from the same section.
When you'll have access to more than one account, you'll be able to access any of them from the account selector in the right top corner. Each account will be opened in new windows to keep them separated. Signing out of your main account will sign you out of all accounts.
When you send email on someone else's behalf, or from another one of your accounts, the receiver will be notified that you sent the email through the secondary account.