A few steps, and most of the waiting is for a mailbox to exist. Here is everything, so you can have it ready rather than hunt for it half way through.
Meridian Freightmeridian-freightAmerica/New_Yorkmeridianfreight.comalex@meridianfreight.comops@meridianfreight.comjane@meridianfreight.comYou can use your own mailbox, or one we host. We recommend your own, and the reason is worth a sentence: if Jane lives at jane@yourcompany.com, your correspondence stays inside your own Google Workspace and we hold nothing but a token scoped to that one mailbox. If she lives on our domain instead, your mail with your customers passes through our systems, and you would be copying an outside address on customer threads — which your own compliance people will have a view about. We will host one if you would rather not create an account, but ask for it deliberately rather than by default.
Everything above is information. These are actions, and none of them can be done on your behalf — which is the point.
In your Google Workspace admin console, add a user for the address above. A standard licensed user — Jane needs to send mail, not just receive it.
Sign in as that mailbox and approve the permissions. This is the only step that gives us access to anything, it is scoped to that one mailbox, and you can revoke it from your Google account at any time.
Email the mailbox with a document attached, then ask her a question about it. If she answers, everything is connected.
This is the step that stalls people, and it is the one we cannot do for you: Jane needs an address of her own inside your Google Workspace, and only an administrator there can make one. It takes about two minutes.
The panels below are sketches rather than screenshots. Google rearranges this console often enough that a captured image goes stale, and a picture of a button that has moved is worse than no picture — what stays true is the menu path and the shape of the form, so that is what they show.
Sign in at admin.google.com as a Workspace administrator, then Directory → Users. Or go straight to admin.google.com/ac/users. Click Add new user.
First name Jane; the last name can be blank or your company name — it is what your customers will see beside her address on a thread. The primary email is the part to get exactly right: it must match the address you gave us, character for character, because that is the mailbox the connection is scoped to.
Anything you like, kept somewhere sensible. You sign in as her once, to grant access in the next step, and after that nobody signs in as her again. She needs no admin rights and no licence beyond a standard seat.
Google takes a little while to make a new mailbox actually reachable. Connecting it in the first minute or two fails in a way that looks like a broken link rather than like something that needs more time, which is why this is a step rather than a footnote.
Use your own work address — the one you told us about. Under Settings you will find one row for the mailbox and one for your calendar, each with an authorize link. Authorize the mailbox as Jane, and the calendar as yourself: she books meetings in your diary, not in hers.
Google shows this while an app is still going through their review, which ours is. The way through is Advanced, then the Go to… link underneath it. If you would rather wait for the review to clear, tell us and we will let you know when it has.
Put her address on the Cc line of a real customer thread. That is the whole of turning her on — there is no other switch, and a thread nobody copied her on is one she never sees.
Only the mail you copy her on. She has no access to your inbox, your drive or anything else in your Workspace — the permission you grant is for the one mailbox you create for her.
Within that, two rules that matter more than they sound. A message you copy her on but do not address to her is watched, not answered: she will remind you about the thread and will not reply to it, however much it reads like a question. And where several of your colleagues use her, they share a knowledge base of company documents and nothing else — your correspondence, your reminders and your customers’ files stay yours.
When you grant access, Google may show a screen saying the app is not verified. That is Google’s review process rather than a problem with the permissions, and we are going through it. Until it completes you can proceed via Advanced → Go to…, or wait for us to tell you it has cleared. We would rather say so here than have you meet it unexpectedly.