MultiDomain email setup

[Bryan-KB]

I'm with a small company that operates two businesses from the same location... Our small staff (7) work both businesses so have email address at both domains.

We've migrated one business entirely to GWS (primary domain)... we use GWS for cloud file storage and use Gmail for email.

The primary and second business use folders in the root of primary domain for file storage... this is convenient for users working with a single login and access to all files.

We now want to move the email for the secondary business to Gmail... using alias addresses would be the simplest, but this is an issue with sending emails as they will show as from the primary in the header and potentially be blocked as spam by recipients... and all emails will be mixed in the same inbox.

If we setup a secondary domain, can individuals have email addresses at both domains without using aliases?... I take it this would mean paying for two accounts for each user?... we would continue to use only the primary domain for files so everything is accessible in one location.

[icrew]

Yes, if you wanted fully-separate addresses, you would need to pay for additional accounts with a secondary domain.

BUT, there's a way to get at least close to what you want without doing that, using aliases:

1) You can filter mail to the two different addresses to different labels in Gmail, by setting up a filter for each user, as follows:

Do a search for "deliveredto:firstdomain.com" and set up a filter to add a "First Domain" label to those messages and skip inbox.

Do a search for "deliveredto:seconddomain.com" and set up a filter to add a "Second Domain" label to those messages and skip inbox.

2) Set up Gmail so that people can send as their @seconddomain.com address, as described at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370, and set the "When replying to a message" setting to be "Reply from the same address the message was sent to", as shown below:

The only downside to this is that calendar invites and shares from Google Drive will always come from users' primary address. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a workaround for that--it comes up fairly frequently as a feature request.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[Bryan-KB]

Ian, that is the approach I had considered for using Aliases... but my primary concern with this is outgoing emails being blocked by the recipients server.

If we do go with an actual secondary domain rather than an alias domain and duplicate some of the users in both, can we still use that secondary domain for aliases for the rest of the users on the primary domain?

[icrew]

If you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up for both the domains, I don't think you're likely to have the emails blocked as spam by recipients--we don't see that when our users send using their aliases in secondary domains. See https://support.google.com/a/topic/9061731 for more details.

Yes, with a secondary domain, you can have a mixture of "full" accounts and aliases in that domain. The same goes for the primary, too, so you could have someone with their main account in the second domain, and an alias from the primary one.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[Bryan-KB]

Ian, yes that is helpful.

I was thinking that outgoing emails carrying an alias "from" domain became an issue because the the header still has the primary domain listed.

Maybe I'll split users between domains, and have aliases to the other in order to minimize the total user count (cost)... or swap the secondary domain to an alias domain and have everyone use aliases on the primary domain if there isn't an outgoing email issue.