Adding Delegates in Outlook for Windows

"Delegation" is the ability to give another user on your domain access to various areas of your SmarterMail account: email folders, tasks, notes, calendars, etc. Giving this access means that user can act as you for things like setting up appointments, sending emails, and more. 

Below are steps for setting up a delegate in Microsoft Outlook for Windows.  (NOTE: Advanced features, such as delegation, require your account to have MAPI & EWS enable.)

  1. Sign in to your account in Outlook .
  2. Click on File in the navigation menu to open up your Account Information.
  3. Click on the Account Settings button, and select Delegate Access from the menu. 
  4. This opens the Delegate window:
  5. Click the Add button. This opens the Add Users window. Here, you can select a user (or users) from the list to have them added as a delegate. You can also search for users, which is helpful if there is a large list of contacts.
  6. Simply select the user you want to add as a delegate, and click the Add button. Once done, the Delegates widow is populated with the user(s) that were added. Once all users have been selected, click the OK button.
  7. After adding in delegates, you set the permissions for each. You have the ability to set different permissions across different areas of your SmarterMail account, giving deletes various access levels based on their own roles and how much control you want to grant. 
  8. Once you click the OK button, the delegate is added. Simply click OK again on the Delegates window to finish adding in delegates.
  9. Delegates are managed essentially the same way: Simply repeat Step 3 to re-open the Delegates window to add additional delegates, remove them, or manage their permissions and properties.
  10. In addition, you can see the Delegates that are part of your SmarterMail account in the webmail interface. Simply log in to your SmarterMail account, and go to Settings -> Sharing and click on the Delegation tab.
  11. You can see the Delegates and the various permissions given for each area. While you cannot fully manage Delegates from the webmail interface, you can remove them. Removing them via webmail also removes them from Outlook. 
Items of note:
  1. Adding or editing a delegate preserves the “share all sub folders with these permissions” for shared folders.
  2. When you’re changing delegate access in MAPI, the permissions dialog is always trying to set the permissions for the Calendar, Tasks, Inbox, Contacts, and Notes folders. There is no preventing this. So if you’re trying to set a new delegate permission the default prompt is Calendar (Editor), Tasks (Editor), Inbox (None), Contacts, (None), and Notes (None). This means it will attempt to set the Calendar and Tasks folders to Manage permissions and the Inbox, Contacts, and Notes to None permissions.
  3. If there are no shared permissions on a folder and MAPI is trying to set None permissions on a folder then no permissions are saved.  Otherwise we’ll save the permissions accordingly.
  4. If the delegate permissions are trying to set Manage on a folder and the user currently has Owner permissions for that folder, the owner permission is used.
  5. If the current folder has None permissions set for a user and MAPI is trying to set the permissions read-only or higher then we’ll set the permissions for that user.
  6. If the current folder has higher permissions than what MAPI is trying to set and it’s because the permissions come from a user group (rather than individually set) then we’ll set the permissions for that user.
  7. If you delete the delegate access from within MAPI we do not remove the permissions that were set. This is because MAPI doesn’t tell us to remove the permissions.