It’s been nearly 10 years since my first “outsourcing” experience, yet just last week I crossed a new barrier I never had before:
My inbox.
In the past, I’ve had my virtual assistant send templated messages on my behalf, but they were sent from an alias account.
We had it set up so that she could send email “as” me. To the recipient, it would look as if it had been sent by me, and replies would ping my regular inbox, but all the action was from her account.
This time around, I’m trying something a little different. I’ve given up on those faux-individual messages because they didn’t generate much response.
Instead I’ve been drafting actual personal messages, though a much lower volume of them, and still based on a pre-written template.
This has become a bit of a chore so I was excited to learn about a Gmail feature that allows you to “delegate” access to your account without sharing your password.
Look under Settings > Accounts and Import > Grant access to your account.
(Currently the user you grant access to must also be a Gmail user. In my case, we just had her create a new Gmail account for this purpose.)
There’s a high level of trust involved because now when my assistant logs in, she can see my entire inbox and 10 years of Gmail history.
But I’m betting on the fact she has better things to do than to read my mail. Let’s hope so anyway!
It’s always something I’ve been a little nervous about, but finally the frustration and pain of this repetitive task go the best of me.
So what she’s doing for me is following a process to draft emails and save them unsent. She’s filling in the to and from fields, subject lines, inserting a pre-written template, and including some research about the individual which I’ll then use to personalize the message.
It’s been only a couple days but this is already a big time-saver and headache saver. Instead of pulling information from several different sources, now I just look in my outgoing drafts, write a couple lines of personal notes, and off they go.
It’s really streamlined and only took about half an hour to set-up and train her on this task.
I can revoke access at any time.
I’m curious, have you ever delegated email access like that before?