Gmail routing for “orders@example.com”

g-suite-administratorgmailgoogle-workspace

I want to know if I'm handling this the right way.

We have some users who are expected to handle the orders@example.com account. They have their own accounts. We can call them jimmy@example.com and holly@example.com.

I wanted all incoming and outgoing orders email to go to both of them.

Default routing only allows for incoming email to be handled. So I added jimmy and holly as additional recipients for all of those emails.

For outgoing email, I used Content Compliance to regex match ALL subject lines for outgoing orders email, and added jimmy and holly as recipients.

Content Compliance is probably NOT meant for this use, but it seems to be working perfectly. jimmy and holly receive all the email, they can see what's from orders@example.com and they can see who it was actually sent to, and they can see what's to orders with a custom prepended subject.

Should I be using a different way, though? Delegation takes more work because then jimmy and holly have to constantly switch back and forth.

Best Answer

Use Groups.

The best way I've found to handle this is to create Groups. These can be set up in the Admin Console alongside Users, and have an input email address, as well as fine grained control over access restrictions.

For groups that will receive from public emails, you'll want to make sure the "Publish Posts" setting is set to "External", otherwise email addresses outside your organization will not be able to send messages to the group address. See image below for access settings recommendations for these types of public-facing groups.

After setting this up, you'll be able to add group members. Each of these people will then be essentially 'subscribed' to all messages sent to the group.

I find this to be much less hacky than the Gmail default routing settings, although still use them for catchalls etc.

Another quick note is that you can use groups as a forwarder to another system, e.g. a ticketing or helpdesk system. For example, support@example.com can be the Support Group, which has one member that is the ticketing system's input address. To do this, you will need to enable the setting "Allow members outside your organisation". With this said, using groups can rewrite the sender's name and email so ensure your system is able to decode the email headers correctly to find the original sender.

In this situation (creating orders@)

  1. In Admin Console, Access Directory > Groups
  2. Click Create Group.
  3. Group Name: Required, Will be seen frequently, so maybe [Business] Orders would do.
  4. Description: Optional, describe what purpose of group is.
  5. Group Email: Required, orders@example.com
  6. Group Owners: Optional, If you want to receive emails, enter your own account in this field. Otherwise, it is okay to leave it blank and manage the group from Admin Console.
  7. Click Next
  8. Access Settings: Required, Set as shown in image below.
  9. Click Create Group
  10. Click Add members
  11. Add members as required. You can also change role to Manager if you want them to be able to add and remove other members.

Group access settings recommendations for public-facing inboxes

Group Access Settings Recommendations

Related Topic