Company Wide Out of Office Message

[PCCT]

I was asked by the CEO to look in to setting up an Out of Office message for the entire company for the holidays.  Looking online, I am not finding anything that seems feasible.  The closest I found was GAM, which looks like it would let me set one for a specific employee, but not for all of our email accounts.  Is this possible to accomplish through the admin console for Google Workspace?

[icrew · Accepted solution]

There's nothing in the admin console that I'm aware of, but GAM makes it pretty easy to loop through every account and execute the same command on each. Check out https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM/wiki/BulkOperations for how to do that. 

Also, the GAM discussion group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-apps-manager is really incredibly helpful, so do please post there if you have any difficulties/questions with trying this.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[PCCT]

Thanks for the info.  I did not see the bulk ops when I was looking through the GAM github.

[itadminguy]

You can do this at the OU level under Compliance settings for Gmail.   Add a Content Compliance rule to add another recipient to Inbound mail to a Google Group called auto-reply@domain.com and then setting an auto-reply in the Email Options of that Google group.  Worked for me.

https://admin.google.com/ac/apps/gmail/compliance?hl=en

Hope that helps someone.

[Alayne]

Hi itadminguy, I am trying to get this set up in my company's workspace. My ultimate goal is the same as the original question asker: find/set up ONE place to manage Auto-Responses for holidays/etc for all my Workspace Users.

Can you give a little more information on your solution? I am at the "Add Setting" of the Content Compliance, but I'm unsure what settings it requires.

Am I also setting up a google group with all of our users under "auto-reply@ourdomain.com"? Can you provide the group settings you used here too? 

If I do need this group, it means that anytime I add a new user, I need to manually add them to this group. Is this correct?

Thanks in advance for your help and time.

[itadminguy]

Hi Alayne,

You want to check the box next to Inbound and then add an expression where the recipient's email contains @yourdomain.com (this will capture all incoming mail).  Then scroll down and check the box next to "Add more recipients" and add the auto-reply@yourdomain.com group.  This will send a copy of all incoming mail to the auto-reply group so be careful and make sure your exec team knows this will happen for confidentiality reasons (maybe there is a way to auto delete it as well).

Your users should not need to be in the auto-reply group.  You can have the group empty, but go to the Security settings of the group and set the auto reply message under Email options next to "Enable auto-reply to non-members outside the organization".

[Alayne]

Thanks @itadminguy -- I was able to set it up and test it. It worked!

[paul_lees]

Hi @Alayne 

Here is a video demo of Patronum, in it you'll be able to see how you can configure an out of office reply for all users via a policy.

Full Demo - (30 mins)

Hope it's useful for you.

[Toutjava]

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