Who is reading your emails? Can your Google Workspace or G Suite admin read your inbox? We know you also ask these questions and now we answer them. Find out more information in this video.
Who is reading your emails? Can Google Workspace admins see emails?
One question that we get asked all the time is “can a manager or G Suite admin see into my emails?” If you're a staff member at a company and that business is using Google workspace, can someone actually access and read my emails? Now out of the box?
The short answer is no. But the longer answer is a little bit more complicated than that.
Basically, once you're an admin of a Google account, there's going to be someone in the business that effectively has control of everything that happens inside that business.
The Google Workspace (G Suite) admin can reset somebody else’s password in the business
There is always a backdoor into that account that every admin has, and that is the ability to reset somebody else's password. Obviously, they can go in and you've got full access to everything that's in that account’s Google Drive and in Gmail.
That’s a pretty normal process when an employee leaves a business for the administrator or the owner of the business to go in and archive that person's emails. Company emails are typically deemed to be company property, depending on how your employment agreement is worded. And so that's a pretty reasonable expectation.
But the fear that many people have is “while I'm working in a business, can the boss see into my inbox?” Unless you've given someone your password, or you haven't changed it, since it was issued to you, there's no way for someone to get access to your account. Unless, of course, you've specifically granted them access.
Granting a Google Workspace (G Suite) admin or other users access to your account from inside of Google
There are a few ways that you can grant access inside of Google, and one of those is to delegate your mailbox to others. So if you set up mailbox delegation to let someone else get access to your mailbox without having to use a password, that's one way.
Another way is if you are utilizing Google vaults within the business. Google vault basically takes a carbon copy of every single email brought across the whole workspace domain. Google saves it into a safe place in Google vault. And that is accessible by administrators of the domain.
So if you're a current employee in a business, and you're worried about someone being able to peek into your inbox, it's unlikely unless they actually have access to your accounts. But in the instance, that an employee has left a business or if you notice that you've logged in one day and your password has been changed, then it's very possible that an administrator has actually access the account. And yes, they then do have access to those emails. So hopefully, that's answered the question for you.
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