We use common email accounts across the organization at Teton Science Schools to manage incoming and outgoing messages. Typically, these accounts are associated with program areas (Field Education), campuses (Murie), or specific departments (HR).
In order to access these shared accounts, we've set up what's called delegated access in Google Mail. Check out the video or tutorial below to see how this works.
1. In order to get delegated access to an account, you'll need to have it granted by the account's owner. If you're not sure who that is, send an IT helpdesk request.
You may receive an email with the subject like "XXXXXX has granted you access to their Teton Science School account -- accept or deny?". You'll want to open the message, scroll down to the first link ("To accept this request, please click the link below:")
2. Once the request goes through, You'll need to refresh your browser tab.
3. After refreshing your Gmail tab, click on the profile picture in the upper-right corner of Gmail. You should see your delegated accounts listed here with a 'Delegated' label:
4. Click on the delegated inbox. This will open a new browser tab where you can access the new delegated inbox. From here you can send, read, label, archive, and delete messages for this shared inbox.
Disclaimers:
It's important to also know that if you send email with 'delegated' rights to an inbox, your name will still be attached to the message. You won't be anonymous, the recipient will receive a small notice that the message was sent 'on behalf of xxxx@tetonscience.org'.
There are also some limitations with delegated accounts in Google Mail. For one thing, as a delegated user, you can't re-delegate access to someone else. You also can't change some of the settings for the inbox; you'll have to be logged in as that user in order to make lasting changes to the settings.
There's also a limit for how many people can have access to a delegated inbox, but it's quite high: 1,000 accounts can have delegated access to an account.