Using G Suite Email Groups – A good option for email forwarding!

Hello!

I recently posted internally at my company about a flow issue one might experience with their custom email address (you bought a domain name like MYNAME.com and want to have a cool email address like MYNAME@MYNAME.com) when getting G Suite and then trying to set up email forwarding under that same custom domain. Essentially the TL,DR is:

You bought an email account (meaning you can send, and receive email, for something like contact@MYDOMAIN.COM.

Now you want to setup other email addresses that you won’t use to send email, just to receive, to forward to your personal email account, like webmaster@MYDOMAIN.COM, privacy@MYDOMAIN.COM, etc. These are commonly referred to as “email forwarding“, since they only “forward” the message to a personal email account you already have.

So I might have felt like this when trying to figure this out with the site was working on:

I then looked into G Suite Email Groups (official guide here), which has been working well for what was needed. I thought of sharing this since this might be useful to others going through the same scenario.

Google Email Groups can be used for many things, but we will focus on the email forwarding aspect here, which is what I have been using it for.

“Email forwards”, “Group Emails”, or “Mailing Lists” are called “Groups” with G Suite. Here is how to set it up, and how to manage them.

How to access G Suite’s Groups

Note: This workflow presumes you already purchased a G Suite email account. If you haven’t yet, refer to the G Suite initial page, here.

• Go to https://admin.google.com/a/DOMAINNAME
  • Sign in with your G Suite credentials
• Click on Groups:

• You will be taken to the “Email Groups” page. Here you can see the existing email forwards/ groups, and also add new groups:

Adding New Email Groups

• To add a new Group, click on the yellow big “+” icon. This will give you the prompt screen below.
  • Please fill out “Name of the group”, and “Group email address”. “Description” is optional. Leave “Access Level” as Public:

• To add the email addresses that will belong to this group, the “Members” or “email recipients”, add them using the “Quick Add” link as shown below:

Managing existing Email Groups

• To manage/ edit an existing group, or to simply check who is currently linked to a certain group (the people being forwarded emails when these groups are sent emails to), click on one of the “Groups” from this list.:

• The following page will come up – in this example, we are checking “Elders”.
  • Here you can quickly add new email recipients to this group, or manage the existing recipients:

• Clicking on “Manage users in …” will bring you to the following screen showing the current “members” of the Group.
  • Here you can add new members, and remove existing ones

Final step – Don’t miss this one!

Unfortunately, by default, all email groups remain locked in a way that only incoming emails from people in the group are allowed (as explained to me by Google Support in live chat). To change this, you will need to go to:

• Click on an Email Group > Access Settings
• Follow the steps below to change the post permissions to Public:

voilà! You can now send emails to something@customdomain and receive it at your personal email account 🙂

 

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Ciao!