Managing a Shared or Delegated Inbox

The general inbox techniques in the email management guide assume one person, one mailbox. Once an executive grants you delegate access — or full impersonation rights — to their account, the work changes shape. You are no longer making productivity decisions. You are operating on behalf of another person inside a system that records every action, with a recipient on the other end who may or may not know the message is coming from you. That changes what you do, what you do not touch, and how you communicate with your executive about what is in the queue.

Get the Permissions Right Before the Workflow

Most email systems offer two distinct levels of access. They sound similar, but they behave very differently:

• Delegate access: you can read and respond to email from your own account on behalf of another. Replies go out with both names visible — typically "Sent on behalf of [executive] by [you]." This is the safer default and works for most admin needs.
• Send-as / impersonation access: you can send messages that appear to come directly from the executive, with no indication you sent them. This is more powerful and substantially more dangerous. It should be granted only with explicit, ongoing consent and a documented expectation about when you would and would not use it.

Have the conversation about which level applies before you start handling the inbox. If your executive defaults to "give the EA whatever access is easiest," push back gently and propose delegate access first. The narrower permission protects both of you and is sufficient for ninety percent of admin work.

The Three Categories of Email You Will See

Inside a delegated inbox, almost every message falls into one of three categories. The category dictates the action.

Category one: yours to handle

Calendar invites, scheduling negotiations, vendor confirmations, internal logistics, requests for documents you control, FYI updates that do not need a substantive reply. These are the messages your executive expects you to dispose of without asking. Move quickly.

Category two: your draft, their send

Replies to questions only your executive can answer, but where you can prepare a draft. Personnel questions where the executive's voice matters. External messages of any consequence. Replies to peers where the substance is theirs but the words can be drafted by you.

The protocol: draft the reply, save as a draft inside their account (do not send), and tell them in your daily sync — not in a separate email back into the same inbox they are trying to clear — that the draft is ready. They edit and send. Over time the edits get smaller as you learn their voice. The drafts never get sent without their hand on the keyboard.

The largest single category of category-two drafts in most inboxes is declines — meeting requests, speaking invitations, networking asks, vendor pitches. The craft of writing those well, and the personal phrasebook that compounds over time, is in declining on behalf: writing regrets and saying no well.

Category three: not yours to touch

Messages from their direct manager, the board, their personal contacts, legal counsel, HR on personal matters, executive coaches or advisors, and anything from family. You can see these. You should not draft replies, archive them, or surface their content unprompted. The right behavior is to leave them alone and let your executive handle them in their own time.

If the question of whether a particular sender belongs in category two or category three is unclear, it belongs in category three until you have explicit instruction otherwise. The default is restraint.

The Audit Trail Matters

Modern email systems log every action — opened, replied, forwarded, deleted, archived — and tag it with the account that performed the action. That log will be reviewed at some point, often when something has gone wrong. Operate as if every action will be audited, because it can be.

Practical implications:

• Do not delete messages on the executive's behalf unless they have explicitly asked you to clean up a class of messages (newsletters, automated alerts, expired calendar invites). Archive instead — it removes the message from view without making it unrecoverable.
• Do not forward sensitive messages to your own account "to work on later." This breaks the audit trail and creates a copy in a system the executive does not control.
• Do not log into the account from a personal device — your phone is fine if it is enrolled in company management, but a personal laptop is not.
• Be explicit when you act on behalf of someone. If you reply to a calendar invite, sign your reply. If you send a logistics note, identify yourself in the first line.

The Daily Sync Saves the Inbox

Running an inbox without a daily — or twice-daily — touchpoint with the executive turns into a guessing game on both sides. Two short windows usually work:

• The morning brief. Five to ten minutes, ideally first thing. You walk through what came in overnight, flag the items that need their decision, and confirm the day's calendar. They tell you what to chase down before noon.
• The end-of-day clear. Five minutes, end of business. You report what was handled, what is still in the queue, and what is escalating. They send any last instructions before disconnecting.

Both windows reduce the number of message-by-message back-and-forths during the day, which is the failure mode that makes shared inbox management feel exhausting on both sides.

Out-of-Office and Other Auto-Responders

Auto-responders set on a delegated inbox often outlive their reason. Two specific cases to handle carefully:

Travel. If your executive is travelling and wants their inbox to feel covered, the better approach than an auto-reply is for you to handle category-one messages in real time and to surface category-two messages by a scheduled check-in. Auto-replies that say "I am travelling and will respond on my return" send to every recipient including the people the executive most wants to reach back. A silent, well-managed inbox often beats a noisy auto-reply.

Extended absence. For a longer absence — vacation, leave, surgery — an auto-reply is appropriate, but make sure it routes time-sensitive matters to a real human (you, or another decision-maker) rather than to a generic mailbox. Phrasing matters: "For matters that cannot wait, please contact [you]" works; "Please email back when [executive] returns" loses messages.

Common Mistakes

• Replying as the executive without telling them. Every "I'm sure they would have wanted me to send this" eventually catches up to you.
• Letting category three drift into category two. Helpful drift is still drift, and your executive is the only person who can move a sender between categories.
• Filing emails into folders the executive does not use. If you build a structure that only you can navigate, the executive cannot find anything when they look. Adopt their structure; do not impose yours.
• Marking everything urgent. If half the items in your morning brief are flagged "needs decision," none of them are. Reserve the flag for things that genuinely require their input.
• Treating the inbox as a to-do list for the executive. Items that need follow-up belong in a tracker the executive controls — not as flagged emails that pile up indefinitely.

When the Arrangement Stops Working

Two failure modes are common enough to flag. The first is when your executive stops trusting the inbox is being kept clean — usually after one missed message becomes visible. Recover by adding visible structure: a daily summary email of what was handled, with totals. The summary itself rebuilds the trust faster than any private apology can.

The second is when the volume genuinely exceeds what one person can responsibly process. If you are sustaining ten- and twelve-hour days inside someone else's mailbox, the issue is not your method — it is the input rate. Bring it up explicitly, with numbers, the same way you would surface any other structural overload. The multiple-executives guide covers the framing for that conversation.

Most of the discipline above pairs with the broader rules in the confidentiality and discretion guide. An inbox is the single highest-density confidential surface in a typical office, and the same defaults apply there: closed by default, audit trail intact, and category three left alone.