There are a number of reasons and scenarios why you might want to share your Google Contacts in this way. Some examples are:

  • I want to give my assistant access to my contacts so he can send out emails to our board members using his Gmail account.
  • My main Gmail account is for personal use but I want to be able to access my personal contacts from my other Gmail account I use for sales.
  • I’ve uploaded a customer list to a “team” Gmail account and I want my sales team to have access to the email addresses from their personal accounts.


Once I share my Google Contacts with others, these contacts will appear as a new group called Delegated Contacts in everyone’s Google Contacts screen.


How to share your Google Contacts using the Delegate feature

  1. Open Google Contacts.
  2. Select the More pulldown menu on the left hand-pane and click Delegate Access
  3. Using the Add people box, enter the email addresses of the other users you wish to share your Google contacts with.
  4. Click Share & save to finish granting the specified users access to your contacts.

(this part was just like sharing any other document with Google Drive)



How to view shared Google Contacts

  1. Go to Google Contacts.
  2. In the left navigation, click the Delegated Contacts dropdown menu.
  3. Under Delegated Contacts, view the names of users who have delegated their contacts to you. Click on the user’s name to enter their My Contacts group with full edit access.


Things you can do when sharing

  1. Invite anyone in your organization to share and have access to your contacts
  2. Avoid having to replicate contacts across Gmail accounts
  3. You can delete or edit a delegated contact and it will automatically be synced to everyone with access to your contacts.


Things you can’t do when sharing contacts

  1. You can’t share your contacts outside your domain.
  2. You can’t limit sharing to a Contact Group. You have to share all of My Contacts.
  3. You can’t create your own Contact Group that include emails from the shared group.
  4. You can’t create a new contact and add it to the delegated group
  5. If you do a search in your address book it will search the delegated contacts


Things to bear in mind and beware of

  1. The syncing of delegated contacts may take a few minutes (try refreshing your screen)
  2. When you click the Delegated contact group is may take a while for the contacts to load (depending on the number of contacts)
  3. If your share your Google contacts with other Gmail users they can delete and change your contacts.
  4. When you delegate your contacts for sharing it includes your entire address book not just part of it.