About delegates: Allow someone to manage your mail and calendar in Outlook

What does Delegate Access do in Outlook?

Delegate Access goes beyond just sharing access to your folders. Delegates are granted additional permissions, such as creating email messages or responding to meeting requests on your behalf. 

As the person granting permission, you determine the level of access that the delegate has to your calendar or mail folders. You can grant a delegate permission to read items in your folders or permission to read, create, change, and delete items.

The delegate can also respond to meeting requests on your behalf, or if you need to grant send as permissions, you can contact your IT admin and request that. Send as permissions can only be set by your organization's admin. If you're an admin, see Give mailbox permissions to another Microsoft 365 user - Admin help.

What are the delegate permission levels in Outlook?

You can set delegate permissions in the following ways:

• Reviewer: With this permission, the delegate can read items in your folders.

• Author: With this permission, the delegate can read and create items, and change and delete items that they create. For example, a delegate can create meeting requests directly in your Mail or Calendar folder and then send the item on your behalf.

• Editor: With this permission, the delegate can do everything that an Author has permission to do and additionally can change and delete the items that you created.

If the delegate tries to perform an action that they don't have permissions for, they'll get an error message to let them know they can't perform that task.

Ready to assign delegate permissions in Outlook?

You can assign delegate permissions to just your calendar, all the folders in your inbox or specific folders only, or your entire mailbox including calendars. For more help with the type of delegation you want to set up, check out the following:

Share and access a calendar with edit or delegate permissions in Outlook

Allow messages to be sent on your behalf when sharing a folder or mailbox