It is such a pain to create email alias with Gsuite. They have tried to fix this with some simplified things, but here is what you need to know:

  1. There is now a simplified UI to create an internal “Group”, this is what they call an email alias. They actually merge two ideas, the first is a discussion board and the second is an email list. They don’t have the latter, so when you create a “Group” you are actually creating a web interface. Now from Gsuite Admin, you can now go directly to Group and click plus to create one.
  2. The permissions are much simplified which is good, you can select who can see it, most often, you will want “Restricted” otherwise anyone in your company can see any post, which is not usually the way you want email to work.
  3. One quirk that remains is that by default all these email lists are “closed” that is you can’t have anyone from the outside send mail to say a group called info@yourdomain.com but to fix this you have to venture into the scary world of Google Groups. Specifically, you have to go to Permissions > Basic Permissions > Posting and select Anyone on the web can post this means that this is now an open alias so beware.
  4. If this is too big of a pain, then you can also go to the Google Groups for Business and enable, any owner can allow outside email this is a actually a pretty big security hole, so you might not want to enable this. Having all the groups private will prevent many spam problems, but it does mean that you don’t have to burrow down into the Google Groups UI to turn this on and also make it easier to audit what is happening as you can see this in the new pretty Groups UI rather than the deep and ugly Google Groups interface.

I’m Rich & Co.

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