Google Workspace – Does ghs.google.com CNAME Work for Secondary Domains

dnsgoogle-apps

Is it posible to use ghs.google.com for a secondary domain within your Google Apps organisation?

eg.

  • acmepaper.com (Primary): mail.acmepaper.com -> CNAME ghs.google.com
    – acmestaples.com (Secondary): mail.acmestaples.com -> CNAME
    ghs.google.com

When in the settings tab to change the service url's the option for a custom url is only shown for our primary domain.

If i change the DNS settings for the subdomain, will google recognise that, or does ghs.google.com only work for the primary domain?

Best Answer

This isn't currently supporting, but there may be work-arounds.

According to Google's help site:

Custom URLs work only for user accounts in your primary domain. Users who sign in with a domain alias address or an address in any other domain associated with your Google Apps account must instead access services using the default URL. (See other limitations with multiple domains.)

At the same time, a support forum discussion from 2009 implies that you can get around it in this way (but I haven't had a chance to test whether this still applies):

  1. Set up your custom url mapping, so mail.example.com points to ghs.google.com
  2. Set up Google Apps to recognize this address and map it to the appropriate service (i.e. Gmail) or Site.
  3. Set up a REDIRECT (not CNAME) to point your second domain to the first, so mail.otherexample.com would redirect to mail.example.com, which is mapped to Google Apps Mail.

This isn't as elegant, but gets the job done.

Related Topic