How to delegate your inbox to a teammate

Overview

Individual inboxes are a great way to manage your own emails, but sometimes it’s helpful to give teammates or your manager access to your inbox for easier collaboration. 

You can share your individual inbox with teammates in Front by using our delegated inbox feature. This feature will allow your teammates to view the conversations in your inbox, and work with you on achieving Inbox Zero by taking actions like archiving or snoozing for you. They can also reply to conversations in your inbox but will reply from their own email address (they cannot reply as you).

When you delegate your inbox to a teammate and share all sections of your inbox, they will also see any private tags you have added to your sidebar. This allows them to access messages you have dragged from your inbox into a private tag, so they aren’t missed.

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Instructions

Step 1

Click the gear icon on the top right of Front and into the Personal settings tab. Click into the Inboxes section.

Step 2

Click the Delegations tab at the top, then click Add a delegation.

Step 3

Select the teammate(s) whom you’d like to give access to your inbox. These teammates will have access to see your Assigned to me and Shared with me sections, as well as any individual inboxes you have connected.

Step 4

When you're finished selecting teammates, click Create at the top right to save your changes, and you’ll see your new delegation listed. Now your teammates will have access to see your emails so you can work together more transparently! If you’re highly collaborative with your teammates, it’s a great way to make your workflows more efficient.

Step 5

Click on a delegation to view its details or edit it.

To delete a delegation, scroll all the way to the bottom of its details page and click Delete this delegation.

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How it works

What teammates can access in your delegated inbox

Once you’ve created your delegation, any teammates with access to your inbox will see a new section in their left sidebar, with your name as the section header. The new section will be located below your shared inboxes.

Below your name in the new section, they will see the same rows and counters that you see in the Me section of your sidebar: Inbox, Assigned to me, Shared with me, Discussions, individual inboxes, Starred, and any tags you've added to your sidebar. They will see the exact same content that you see when you click into these sections. Lastly, if you star a conversation in a delegated inbox, it will appear in that teammate's Starred section. 

What teammates can do

Teammates can take these actions on your behalf in your delegated inbox: 

• Archive or snooze conversations in your inbox
• Mark conversation as spam
• Star conversations
• Drag conversations into any private tags added to your sidebar
• Move conversations to a shared inbox
• Tag conversations with shared tags
• Assign a conversation 
• Search for conversations in the delegated inbox

What teammates cannot do

Teammates cannot take these actions on your behalf in your delegated inbox: 

• Reply using your email address (they can reply using their own email address)
• Comment as you (comments posted will be as them)
• Block Sender
• Mark as Read for you (they can Mark as Read for themselves)
• Tag conversations with your private tags

Hiding or showing a delegated inbox

You can choose which delegated inboxes you want to show or hide in your sidebar. Go into your Settings, and click on Preferences. Scroll to the setting called Delegated inboxes and use the dropdown menu to select which teammates you want to show or hide in your sidebar. The teammates you select will now be displayed.

Note: When a teammate is blocked, you will still have access to their delegated inbox and you can still see their inbox history in Front. If you don't want to visually see it in your Front, you can simply hide the inbox in your preferences.

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Customize your delegation

Share specific individual inboxes

You may have multiple individual inboxes connected to Front, like your work email address and your personal email address. If you only want to share a subset of your individual inboxes with your teammates,  you can do so by toggling the Share all sections option as you create or edit your delegation.

You can then select the specific individual inboxes to share. Your teammates will then only be able to view the contents of the specified individual inboxes.

Disabling Share all sections limits what your teammates can access from your inbox and their view of your inbox in their sidebars. When Share all sections is disabled, teammates will not see your Assigned to me or Shared with me sections or your the private tags added to your sidebar, and they will not see your inbox counters. 

Share all sections does not impact what the teammate can or cannot do within the inbox; this stays the same regardless of whether Share all sections is disabled or enabled.

Control sharing within specific delegated inbox

There may be cases where you want to delegate an individual inbox, but do not want to share everything in your inbox. In these cases, you can build individual rules and individual tags to route certain emails out of your inbox and file them into private folders, if the contents of the emails are predictable. For instance, you may want to share all emails sent by customers but not emails sent to you by internal teammates. Here's how you can set this up:

1. In your delegation, toggle Off the Share all sections option.
2. Check off the specific inboxes you want to share.
3. Go into your Personal settings and create an individual rule that says: When inbound, if From is in domain yourcompany.com, then add tag Your tag and remove tag Inbox. This will move the emails out of your actual inbox and file them into your individual tag that only you have access to. The removal of the default Inbox tag is the action that takes the email out of your individual inbox, so this action must be present for the rule to work.
4. Add your private tag to your own sidebar, so that you can quickly access these emails. The private tag now acts as a folder that your delegated teammates cannot see, since you've turned off Share all sections.
5. Always test your rules to ensure they work as intended.

You can alter the rule conditions and tag names as you need. Keep in mind that rules only work if your emails have predictable factors you can build into rule conditions. If you cannot reliably predict which emails should remain confidential, then it would be best to not delegate your inbox; instead, build rules or manually share specific emails with teammates.

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Analytics in delegated inboxes

When you delegate your inbox to a teammate and they help send replies for you from their own individual channel or from a shared channel, the analytics will be recorded in your teammate's individual analytics report or the team report, instead of in your individual analytics report.