Please Fix Groups For email and distribution lists

[Deodato]

Hello,

I was suggested by Google Support to write my case here since it is a development issue.

The last feature updates on groups have ruined the way my organization uses groups. We joined Google's email solution in around 2009, and with the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) policies in Europe, we started to use groups in the following way:

Department email that is more than 20 years old is forwarded to group email.
The group email delivers the email to all personal mailboxes of the members of the group.
Every member of that group can reply to the department email.
This worked fine for years, but recent updates have ruined it for us, and groups' email addresses that were hidden started to be publicly visible every time someone forwards or replies to an email, leading to internal and external contacts misunderstanding what the real official email address of the several departments of my organization is.

Adding the department mailbox directly to everyone's mailbox is not an option because I lose control of who can receive or stop receiving emails at a certain time if needed.

I tried to show my coworkers the group interface in a possible migration scenario, but 100% of them said no. Unless the group's interface works like the Gmail interface, they don't even want to look at it.

A possible fix is to allow forwarding emails on Gmail definitions to more than one mailbox or a group that is hidden and 100% transparent for external and internal users of that group, like groups were before this update.

In my Google Workspace Support case number 44572892, I even reported a very bizarre situation caused by this new update on groups. An email sent to the department email from, let's say, external_email@something.com, that was received on the coworker's mailbox through the distribution of the group, when forwarded to other emails, instead of showing on the head of the email with "From external_email@something.com," it changed to "From Internal_Group_Address@mydomain.com," making a possible reply to the original sender impossible.

I have contacted Google support with this issue three times, and all of them said the same thing: "it is what it is," and "we can't help you with this," which is a very poor way to see things. Finally, the last person suggested that I write it here, hoping it gets fixed.

Best regards.

[ajojose33333344]

@Deodato 

Usually we can tackle this by using:

1)use Groups interface 

2) Use a third party crm tool

3) Let the sender join the group and send email(the public forums based on google groups does this)

And i assume most of them won't be feasible for you from your issue description.

and I agree with you to the fact that its actually a necessary option have.

The support team might have asked you to add it in the feature idea section I guess:

You might want to post this to the Feature Ideas section here. Doing so will allow it to be upvoted by others and possibly considered as a future feature enhancement.

If you do not already have access, you need to request it first. See https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/custom/page/page-id/Workspace-Feature-Ideas-FAQ#:~:text=How%... for how to do that.

Once you have access, go to https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/gh-p/workspace-ideas-group . There, you can upvote and comment on any similar idea, or post a new idea.

[Deodato]

Hi @ajojose33333344 , and thank you for your reply.

I have been struggling with this issue since the update that ruined it. I contacted Google Support to fix this, but it seems there is no fix, and I'm not the only one complaining about it. The worst part is that, and I may have misunderstood, the support teams are not allowed to escalate the tickets.

Regarding your suggestions:

1. There is no option in groups that can fix this.
2. This was working fine before one update from Google, so to sum up, a) they broke it on purpose for whatever reason they want, b) they broke it by mistake and it needs to be fixed.
3. All the email accounts involved are part of the group except for the external and original sender, as it should be.

Thank you for suggesting that I "post on suggestions." I'm not sure if I need to do that or ask if this post can be moved there. I will wait a day or two to find out.