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.
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