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Sending as a group is very useful and part of our Gmail driven culture, but it seems like something only an administrator can do. You can too - learn how to set it up for your team.
Classical use cases are:
Looking official (speaking for a project team or an internal function)
Protecting your identity (when questions/answers/feedback should not come to you, but to the group).
Google groups is much more powerful than most of us realize.
What groups are (in most big enterprises)
What groups are (in most big enterprises)
Distribution lists
All email sent to a group lands in somebody's inbox, mixed with their remaining email (we have filters for that).
What groups are not (in most big enterprises)
What groups are not (in most big enterprises)
External places "where emails go"
Repositories for emails different than your mailbox
Programmable.
Let's dive in. You will need:
A Gmail account. Working at a job generally comes with one.
A Google Group that you are a manager off.
For this tutorial, we will use an old subscriber group for this blog. This is the group that receives updates of, you guessed it, this blog. (Click here to be added!)
You will need to do this procedure only once per group.
Step 1: Prepare the group
Step 1: Prepare the group
You do not want anybody sending in the name of your group, so you need to ask the group for permission. This is done in Gmail (we'll get to that), which sends an email into the group. The group must receive that email, it must forward the email to somebody and that somebody must answer it - let's make sure that can happen.
Find the group
Visit groups.google.com (tell them I sent you!)
Find your group, probably easiest under "My groups".
Click Manage, as seen below. If you don't see it, you don't have managing rights to this group and should talk to the person who is managing it.
Manager's privileges.
Make sure only you get email
When somebody asks the group for permission to send as group, the group gets an email. Since groups at most enterprises are essentially mailing lists, normally all group members would get your email and a lot of "what is this" and "please disregard" would follow. Don't be like that.
The easiest way to make sure we don't annoy people is to temporarily override the delivery settings. Make sure you take note of what you're doing so you can revert afterwards!
Click Members, All Members
Select all members
Select Actions, Change Delivery Setting, No email
Select yourself and select All email for you.
Shutting everybody out.
Enable receiving external email
The email that will be sent to ask for permission does not really come from you, it will come from the Gmail service, which is outside of your company. So you need to make sure your group can receive email from outside - many groups cannot by default. In Groups speak, you will adjust the posting permissions.
As before, remember the previous configuration so you can restore it later.
Click Permissions, Basic Permissions
Set Post to Anyone on the web.
Opening the group to the web.
Step 2: Ask for permission
Step 2: Ask for permission
Congratulations! You can now ask the group for permission without getting yelled at.
Open beautiful new Gmail
Go to Settings, Accounts and click Add another email address.
An ugly window from the age of dinossaurs will open (remember when browsers had pop-up windows?).
Enter the name you would like to appear as. Typically, this is the name of the Google Group ("The Last Stop" in our example).
Enter the email address of the Google group. There is no email lookup, that's how bad things were. Type it in full.
Leave Treat as an alias unchecked
Click Next Step
Send verification.
Be greatful about Gmail's evolution and close the ugly window.
Head back to Gmail. The group should have received an email, which it forwarded to you (and you only...!). Follow the instructions in that email. After that, the email and its links become useless.
Phew! This was a lot of work - so if there are several people on your team who will need to post, this is a good moment to sit next to them and make them follow the entire step 2. You will get all the permission emails they generate and will need to accept every one of them.
Told you it was ugly.
This is what caused all the work so far.
You made it.
I didn't get the email!
I didn't get the email!
Don't panic. Check the group's email address you selected, check that the group can receive outside email, check your own delivery settings. It always works when you get it right.
If at any point you get really stuck, go back to the accounts settings, delete the entry you created and start over.
Step 3: Reset the group
Step 3: Reset the group
You are not done yet - you left the group in a disfunctional state. Go back to managing your group and
restore delivery settings
restore posting permissions.
Celebration! You are now able to send as a group.
Extra: About your new powers
Extra: About your new powers
With great powers come great responsibilities.
You are NOT anonymous. People can look at the email's "source code" and discover who really sent that email. Your actions can be audited.
You will be able to post as the group after you reload Gmail.
Permissions are for life. You cannot check who you gave permission to post or revoke the permission. See the first bullet point.
So I won't let you post as Collab Thinking (or the old Last Stop). You should really be on the other side as a member of this exclusive list and get really nice blog posts delivered twice a week. Click here to do just that - and we'll try that next week. Thank you for reading!
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