What exactly is groups intended use?

[julianfd]

Hey guys, 

we just startet using workspace and had big hopes. 

One thing, we just don't really get. And that is Groups. We initally thought that with groups we can manage our general email adresses: mail@ support@ and so on. 

But the reality is quite difficult...
No Signatures possible, No possibility to use it properly with gmail (so that others can follow conversations), emails are just piling up in the group, because everyone just answers them within their gmail. When someone answers an email with their gmail account, the mail does not show up in the group conversation... 

I just don't get it. 

We saw a tool called hiver. Is that the solution? Or should we just witch directly to zendesk or something? 

What exactly is the purpose of groups? I just don't get it. 
 

[icrew]

Groups is fundamentally designed for use in the following ways (among others, these are just the ones that came to mind first):

• As a discussion mailing list for team members (or people around the world) to communicate with each other around a shared task or interest.
• As a way to control access in Google Drive (you can share a file, folder, or Shared Drive with a group, and that access updates as the group membership changes)
• As a way to invite people to meetings in Google Calendar
• As a way to enable/disable features in the Google Admin Console.

You are correct that it can be used as a rudimentary shared inbox/ticketing system using the "Collaborative Inbox" features--see https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/167430 for the details, but it definitely is rudimentary. For the uses you describe, a better solution might be to set up a separate account for support@example.com or mail@example.com  and use Delegated Access (which you can control with a Group!) to allow people to get into that account and respond to/act on messages there. See https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/168126 for details about that.

There are also quite a few more-robust ticketing systems that integrate with Google, but unfortunately I don't know all that much about those (I work at a very large organization, and other folks run ours), so hopefully someone else will chime in with advice about which might be a good choice.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[julianfd]

Thank you Ian for the insight. 
This is actually pretty bad for us. We are just a very small company, but we have at least 4-5 general E-Mail Addresses for different purpsoses like: billing, support, notifications... etc.
A dedicated user account for every general email address we use just to have a proper inbox nad signature is just to expensive. 😞

Is there any other way to have the MX record active (for our personal email adresses), but not for our general email addresses? Or is it possible to access those group email addresses through imap at all? 

Or maybe someone else has a tip here? We really like working with gmail now but this missing feature of managing general email accounts is pretty bad. With our old provider we can have as many email inboxes as we want. 

[icrew]

Check out the “split delivery” option on https://support.google.com/a/answer/2685650 — essentially that tells Google “if you know how to deliver a message to an address you manage (an email box or group), deliver it. If not, throw it over the wall to this other place (your old email provider, perhaps).

Cheers,

Ian

[cryptochrome]

Google Groups is pretty much a dead product that hasn't seen any development or progress in years. 

You have various options at your disposal, the one @icrew mentioned being one of them. Although that might be a bit of overkill if we are talking about just a hand full of general purpose addresses. I'll list a few more options below:

One option is to route these emails elsewhere, for example, to another mailbox (like a shared inbox solution like HelpScout or FreshDesk). Routing can be accomplished through various ways. One easy to implement and easy one is using address maps. There are a couple more, and they are all listed in this Advanced Email Routing help article. 

You can also simply use Google Groups from within Gmail, where every group member gets every email to the group delivered to their personal inbox. If you set up the group address as an alias address inside of Gmail, you can even respond from the group email address from inside Gmail. This would be the cheapest route, but as always, you get what you pay for. 

On the more advanced side of things are apps like Missive or Front, which specialize on your use case, but are paid options (and in the case of Front, not exactly cheap). 

Hope this helps. 

[christiannewman]

The key is to always reply-all - this will cc the group on all correspondence ensuring full history of the conversations are archived in the group for everyone to follow.

In their Gmail accounts, users can set up custom signatures for mail sent via the group.

There are additional groups features you can enable to help you categorize/label conversations, and even assign them to specific team members.

Feel welcome to reply back or reach out if you need help.

[julianfd]

This is not working, or we're doing something wrong. Our workflow:

Group Email mail@

Every Member sets the Email delivery to: every email. 
Every Member sets up his gmail, so he/she can write mails as mail@

If a new mail is sent to the group from external entities, and the mail gets forwarded to all personal inbox. There is no possibility to click "reply all". We can only click "reply" which sends a reply to the group email but not the original sender.

What do we do wrong? 

[cryptochrome]

The Reply-All option is, by default, pretty hidden away in the three-dot-menu. You can make it visible at all times by going into your Gmail settings > General and turning this on:

 

[julianfd]

We already set this to "reply all" Still. Since my gmail "sees" the email coming from the group mail (mail@) itself and not from the external sender, we can only reply to the group mail via our gmail and not to the original sender.

We always have to answer the email through the group directly. Means no Signature, and no mobile app.  

Sounds pretty confusing I hope I explain myself right. 

[cryptochrome]

Ah yes, I think I know what you mean now. Please go to groups.google.com, select the group and then go to the group's settings. In the general section, you should find this:

 If it is not set to Author's address like in the screenshot above, change it to Author'S address and then try again.

Not 100% sure that's the fix, but it could be. 

[julianfd]

Hey hey, we changed the setting, but this is still not solving the issue. 

The only thing we want to achieve is to be able to answer to external group mails through gmail. 
But if we click on reply (which is the only option in gmail) we only answer back to our own mail@ address. 

[cryptochrome]

That is really odd. I am out of ideas here. I would double-check Gmail to see if you really don't have a reply-all option. 

[memdump]

@julianfd, I vaguely remember running into this same issue a while back. Try setting Post replies to -> The author of the message only.

Google's documentation lists this option as The author of the original message (https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2464926 -> Advanced settings reference -> Email options)

You might have Post replies to set to something else (e.g. A custom address) which might not be instructing Google's mail server to include the email address of the original sender when forwarding the email to members of your group.

Also, the option to modify recipients in your Reply could hidden by a downward-pointing carat-icon located on the same line as the To: field in your email draft. Once you click on that, in Gmail, you should be able to modify both the To: and Cc: fields (Google Groups seems to only allow you to modify the Cc: field).

Give this a try and see if it works!

[julianfd]

Hey memdump, 

after we spent some time with the support we figured it out and it was like you said. We had the option on "all members of the group"  so every external mail address was not included. We set it now to: sender chooses recipient. 
Now it works. 

[memdump]

@julianfd Awesome, glad you got it resolved!

[StephenHind]

@julianfd as @christiannewman mentioned the issue you're facing is you're not using the Reply To All option: if you do that then the group email address is CC'd and everyone sees that response (this is just basic email usage, not a deficiency in Groups).

Please ignore @cryptochrome's comment of "Google Groups is pretty much a dead product that hasn't seen any development or progress in years" because it's false, in fact it's worse than false it's the opposite of what's happened.  Groups has seen seen two updates this year, many updates in the previous couple of years, and underwent an extensive redesign in 2020. There will be more updates for sure!

[cryptochrome]

---

@StephenHind wrote:

Please ignore @cryptochrome's comment of "Google Groups is pretty much a dead product that hasn't seen any development or progress in years" because it's false, in fact it's worse than false

---

Let's just agree to disagree then. 

Groups hasn't seen any substantial progress in years. The Material Design update was just that: fresh paint. The collaborative inbox feature is an absolute joke compared to other shared inbox solutions and the fact that it isn't fully integrated with Gmail is laughable. I really like Google (I'm a partner, after all), but Google Groups is the worst UI/UX experience in the entire Workspace family. It needs to go away and replaced with something that's actually usable. 

[jatkin]

Despite their origins as an email provider, Gmail as a whole has taken a back seat to: Chats, Calendar, Meet, Drive, to name a few. And their support has gone down-mountain (much steeper than a hill).

Google needs to clean up the options and simplify using Groups when selecting for email purposes only.

[julianfd]

As mentioned above. I don't have a reply all button in my gmail. Only "reply". Then the message gets only send to the mail@ address. 

In groups we can answer incoming email with "reply all" but there is no signature adding feature at all. That doesn't make sense at all. 

[christiannewman]

To get "reply all" to appear by default, you have to change this in Gmail settings:

If you haven't changed this setting, you can still "reply all" as follows:

Or by using the "a" shortcut, if keyboard shortcuts are turned on in Gmail settings as follows:

[julianfd]

The problem wasn’t this setting it was the setting to whom we reply. It was set „to all members“ which meant no external people where included. We now have it one“sender chooses recipients“ now everything works.

[SergioAlvarez]

I would say that if you want to use Groups as a support or main email address, you might want to convert your group to a collaboration inbox, instead of using your personal email account, use the google group interface to reply from there and keep track of the issues by using the collaboration features. More info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uzYQIRS0Ks 

[ConcernedCitizn]

Just set this up for a new domain, it's basically usable after lots of playing around.
Things that currently make the product difficult to setup and use and they could easily be improved:
1.  The ability to add the groups as user aliases in the Google Admin page/app.  Adding them to users one by one is messy.
2. All emails sent by Group Users when using the group address should automatically be included in the conversation without having to add the group email as a cc.
3. The groups.google.com start page should show the Groups unread count, pending etc.
4. If Groups could be an iPhone and Android app it would be perfect.

Thanks to all above members on this thread, the content reassured me that I was not totally incapable!! It really helped to get set up as well as possible with what we have been given by Google.
Not sure if this is the right place to post this, so if there's a better place for suggestions that might actually reach the Google product management, please let me know.

[icrew]

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 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.

If you are submitting a feature idea, be sure to explain the problem that you're trying to solve with the feature idea, not just the idea itself. For example, saying "when my users are trying to do 'A', they often get confused by the fact that the buttons to do 'X' and to do 'Y' look quite similar to each other, which leads to this unintended consequence" is far more likely to get fixed than a feature idea that just says "change the color of the button 'Y'".

Cheers,

Ian