Google Workspace Email Migration to Google Groups

[tykel_]

Our organization is in the process of migrating our shared email accounts to Google Groups to increase security and efficiency in responding to emails. Due to a recent migration to SSO, shared gmail acocuts are no longer a viable option for our organization. After a chat with Google Support, there is currently no way to migrate email (and labels) from a Workspace Gmail account to a Google Groups collaborative inbox.

We are in urgent need of a workaround for this issue. Allowing migration assistant or GWMME to migrate to Google Groups accounts would be the best solution.

[Jessica_CM]

Hello @tykel_,

Thanks for joining our Community. I wanted to let you know that I have moved your post from Community Feedback to Workspace Q&A, since this is a product question.
I have also edited your labels to help with visibility.

[icrew · Accepted solution]

Hi @tykel_ :

You can do this with the free, open-source, command line "Got Your Back" (GYB) tool, created by Jay Lee who also created the more-well-known GAM tool that's an indispensable tool for managing Google Workspace.  See https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back/wiki for more details on GYB, and specifically https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back/wiki#--action-restore-group for how you'd restore messages to a group (after using GYB to back them up from an account). There's also a pretty active Google Group to ask any questions about GYB--see https://groups.google.com/g/got-your-back/about for info and to subscribe.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[tykel_]

Thank you for this! I was able to get everything migrated in a few minutes.

As a side note- I think the Google team could still work to make a native migration experience from Google Admin. Just putting that out there in case someone from the feature request team stumbles upon this.

[Jessica_CM]

Thanks for sharing your feedback, @tykel_ (and thanks for the workaround @icrew). We do have Googlers actively reading comments in the Community, but you can also request access to our Feature Ideas area to post your suggestion there. 🙂

[chris_barrow4]

Hi @tykel_ SSO will not stop you using shared mailboxes, you can use delegated access for user's who need to access the mailboxes. This user's their existing credentials to authenticate and they don't need to know or use login details for the shared mailboxes.

If you still want to migrate mail to a Google group, you can use CloudM migrate, or the free tool GAM which @icrew mentioned.

[CloudGuardians]

Definitely go with GYB (suggested by @icrew), as sharing accounts (different from delegating access) is never a good approach. And delegating access might also not be enough for what you're looking for.

However, you must bear in mind that groups have some limitations and, unless you are willing to use the Groups UI instead of the Gmail UI, you might need to create some compliance and/or routing rules in the Admin Console to make sure that users know if someone has already replied to a message, to avoid duplicated replies. If you're OK with using the Groups UI then it's not a problem as users will see messages and replies, and you can even assign topics to users.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Nuno

Cloud Guardians

[joe_tierney]

We use CloudM's Migrate tool to do this. Works great. 

[micah_noble]

Not sure what exactly your hoping to achieve with Groups but as CloudGaurdians mentioned, groups has some limitations.  I know for our company it was not the solution we hoped it would be but here are some of the challenges we encountered just in case the info helps;

• No group email signatures
• No ability to organize and/or archive messages (everything stays in the inbox until deleted)
• Cannot attach documents from Drive
• Cannot save directly to Drive
• No canned responses or templates
• No ability to sort messages such as alphabetically, by sender, by date, etc.
• You can apply filters to your view but labels are no longer visible and an bulk actions cannot be used such as marking complete, assigning labels, etc.

Best of luck