Act as a teammate

Sometimes the fastest way to answer a conversation is to work from inside the account that owns it. A teammate goes out sick, a pod lead covers a queue, or an assistant handles their director's mail. Act as a teammate lets someone step into a colleague's account view. They work the inbox exactly as the teammate would see it, then step back out. Every session stays visible to the teammate it happens to. No one can reach anything privileged while the session is live.

Who can do that for whom is a delegation: a single pairing you set up in Settings → Delegation, at one of two access levels. The pairing is the permission — there is no separate role to hold.

It is off by default. An owner turns it on in Settings → Team before anyone in the workspace can use it.

Turn it on

Settings → Team → Act as a teammate is owner-only — an admin can see the toggle but cannot flip it. Three knobs:

Option	Controls
Enable act as a teammate	Whether the capability exists at all in this workspace. Off by default.
Session length	How long a session runs before it ends itself — 15 minutes up to 8 hours.
Need a reason	Whether the person who steps in must write a short note before a session starts. CommSync stores the note with the session and shows it to the teammate.

If you turn the capability off, every live session in the workspace ends immediately — not just future ones. The policy lives on the Team page. The delegations it governs live on their own page, Settings → Delegation. You can set those up before the policy is on, and they take effect the moment it is.

Delegations

A delegation is one pairing: a delegate (the person who gets the access) and a teammate (whose inbox they can reach). Manage them in Settings → Delegation, grouped by delegate so you can see everything one person can reach at a glance. Search by name or email, then click anyone to open a side panel. The panel answers both directions at once: who can act as them, and whose inbox they can act into.

Anyone in the workspace can be a delegate. That is deliberate: the people who actually cover for each other are rarely all admins.

• A team lead who is an ordinary member can hold a delegation over their reports.
• An assistant can hold a delegation over the director or owner they support — delegation runs upward as readily as downward.
• An admin can hold a delegation over the members they cover.

The owner is the exception that needs no pairing. They can already act as any teammate in the workspace. If a delegation names the owner as the delegate, CommSync refuses it as redundant.

The map view

The Delegation page has a second view, Map, next to the search box. It draws every delegation as an arrow from the delegate to the inbox they can reach. A solid line means full access; a dashed line means view-only. The layout runs left to right, so a chain reads as a chain, and two people who cover each other read as a pair. Only people who hold or receive at least one delegation appear, so the picture stays readable in a large workspace. The map shows the owner's implicit authority as a halo on their card, not as an arrow to everyone.

If you hover over an arrow, it highlights just that delegation and who set it up. If you click a person, it opens the same both-directions side panel the list uses. If you search, CommSync dims everyone who does not match, but it does not hide them, so the chains stay intact. Use the expand button in the corner to open the map full-screen, which is the comfortable way to read a large workspace. The page always opens on the list.

Access levels

Every delegation carries one of two levels, shown as a badge on the row and changeable at any time from the row menu.

Level	What the delegate can do
Full access	Read the inbox, reply and send under the teammate's name, archive, snooze, label, and file threads.
View only	Read the inbox. Nothing else — no sending, no filing, and it does not mark a thread as read.

View-only is the right level for oversight. A lead can use it to check how busy a queue is. A manager can use it to review coverage. Neither one changes a single one of the teammate's unread counts. See View-only sessions below for what that looks like from inside.

Who can create a delegation

Only certain roles can create a delegation, but anyone can hold one:

Delegation	Owner	Admin	Member
Any delegation between any two teammates	✓	—	—
Themselves as delegate, over a member	✓	✓	—
Themselves as delegate, over an admin or the owner	✓	—	—

In short, an owner can set up any delegation, and that includes ones that run upward. An admin can create a delegation only for themselves, as delegate over a member. A member can hold a delegation but can never create one. Members can still see the delegations that involve them on the Delegation page. They see both the people they cover and the people who can cover for them. They just cannot change any of them.

Three rules hold regardless of who asks:

• Nobody can act as a CommSync Agent, because agents are service accounts with no account view to step into.
• You cannot hold a delegation over yourself.
• You cannot act as someone in a different workspace.

Enter a session

Open the account menu (top of the sidebar) and choose Act as…. Eligible teammates appear directly in the list. The list only ever shows people the system allows you to step into. There is nothing to try that CommSync would refuse. Anyone who holds a delegation sees this menu, member or not.

A delegation set to view-only shows a View only tag in the list. That way you know, before you start, what kind of session you are about to open. If the workspace requires a reason, CommSync asks you for one first.

The moment a session starts, the app reloads as that teammate. You see their inbox, their channel presence, their labels, and their view of every thread they can see. The session shows the app at full fidelity. That includes a narrowed inbox, exactly as the teammate has set it up — not the wider view your own role can otherwise grant.

You can only ever act as one person at a time. You cannot start a second session from inside the first. Step out before you step into someone else.

What stays out of reach

Act as a teammate lets you do a teammate's work. It does not let you acquire their account. While a session is live, CommSync blocks these surfaces outright. It does not just hide them — it refuses them at the server, even if you find a way to the page:

Surface	During a session
Read the teammate's channels	✓
Reply and send as the teammate	✓ with full access · — when view-only
Archive, snooze, label, or mark a thread as read	✓ with full access · — when view-only
Create, view, rotate, or revoke an API key	—
Billing — tier, seats, payment method	—
Manage roles, invites, or the act-as policy for the workspace or the org	—
Connect, disconnect, or reassign access to a channel	—
Credentials — secrets for email or SMS providers, and webhook secrets	—

If you land on one of these pages during a session, the page shows a plain explanation of why. It also shows a single button back to your own account — the same escape hatch that is always available.

View-only sessions

A view-only session looks and behaves like a read-through of the teammate's inbox, and it says so everywhere:

• The banner across the top reads Viewing as [Name] — read-only.
• CommSync replaces the composer with a one-line explanation — there is nothing to type, because you cannot send anything.
• Archive, snooze, mute, labels, delete, and mark-as-read are all switched off, with the reason on hover.
• A thread stays unread even after you open it.

Like every session, the banner also shows the same countdown and the same Back to my account button. The teammate's unread badges stay exactly where they were before the session — nothing changes them while you look.

The server enforces all of it independently: it refuses any write during a view-only session, no matter which route the request takes. If you change a delegation from full access to view-only, it takes effect on any session that is already active. If you widen a delegation from view-only to full access, it does not upgrade a live session. The session stays read-only, and the wider access applies the next time the delegate steps in.

Send as the teammate

The composer carries a small indicator whenever you act as someone. A message you are about to send is never ambiguous about whose voice it is in. The first time you send in a session, CommSync asks you to confirm the message goes out as that teammate. After that first confirmation, the reminder steps back for the rest of the session.

CommSync attributes every message sent during a session twice in its records. The records show who actually wrote it — you, the person who stepped in — and whose account it went out under, the teammate. That distinction is what lets the teammate's own audit trail read "you looked" and "they wrote as you" as the different events they are.

Exit

You can find Back to my account in the account menu, or in the banner across the top of the app for the whole session. It ends things immediately and puts you back exactly where you were, on the same page. A session also ends itself automatically the moment its time window runs out. If you are away when that happens, CommSync exits you the next time you return to the keyboard. It does not trap you mid-session.

The teammate, or an owner or an admin of the workspace, can end your session early from their own side. You return to your own account the moment they do.

What the teammate sees

A session is never invisible to the teammate it happens to:

• An email the moment a session starts, which names who stepped in and when the session ends.
• A live notice while the session is active, with an End session button that works immediately.
• An access log in Settings → Account that lists every session where someone acted as them.
• Owners and admins can also see an organization-wide access log.

The live notice reads "[Name] is viewing your account," and its End session button works right away, no matter which device the teammate uses. Each entry in the access log shows who acted, when, and how long the session ran. It also shows whether they sent anything, and the reason, if the workspace required one. The organization-wide log covers every act-as session in the workspace, not just the viewer's own.

Two examples

Cover a queue. Priya owns the workspace at Northwind Clinical. Marcus leads the front desk — he is an ordinary member, not an admin. Priya has given him a full access delegation over each of his reports. That includes Dana, who is out for the afternoon while the walk-in queue grows by the minute.

Marcus opens the account menu, picks Act as… → Dana, and writes a one-line reason (Northwind requires it). He answers three threads exactly as Dana would have. He confirms once that the replies go out as her. When he finishes, he clicks Back to my account and lands back on the page he started from.

Dana gets an email the moment Marcus starts. She sees a live notice the whole time, in case she comes back early. Later, she checks Settings → Account and sees the session logged there — who, when, and that three messages went out under her name. Priya, as owner, can see the same session in the workspace-wide log, alongside every other session that has happened.

Oversight without action. Priya also wants to see how the team handles the new intake mailbox, without any disruption to anyone's work. As owner, she already has access, so she gives herself nothing new. Instead, she sets Marcus's delegation over the newest hire to view only while the new hire settles in.

Marcus can read every thread and see how the queue changes. He cannot reply, archive, or clear a single unread badge. When the hire is up to speed, Priya switches that one row to full access from the row menu.