How to set up group E-mails with your custom Gmail account.

Starting a company is hard. Figuring out how to set up and configure E-mails for your organisation shouldn’t make your life any harder. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how I walked through solving two issues we recently had at Moni — redirecting E-mails sent to old staff to new staff and creating a support E-mail group that allows members of the support team and certain people outside this team receive support E-mails at their company E-mail addresses.

Setting up an E-mail alias in your custom Gmail account

E-mail aliases in G-mail allow you to create an E-mail address that will forward any E-mails sent to that address to a user’s E-mail address in your user list at no extra cost.

Use cases for an E-mail alias

At Moni, there are 2 major use cases where we’ve used E-mail aliases.

Case 1: When we hire someone on a temporary contract and their contract ends, we like to forward all future communication sent to that E-mail to the company E-mail of someone else currently working at the company.

For example, if we hired someone to work in support who had an oyinola@moni.africa e-mail when they leave, we can delete them from the user list in the Google admin console and forward any future E-mails to this e-mail (oyinola@moni.africa) to the E-mail address of a new hire, say segi@moni.africa.

This way, we can ensure that any future communication sent to someone who is no longer at the company isn’t lost.

Case 2: A second use case for an E-mail alias is when you have an organization structure like we do where there’s a parent company with several products. We can create an E-mail alias using the domain for different products that will be forwarded to a primary E-mail.

For example, imagine that we had a parent company called Company A and Company A had Products B and Products C. Assuming we hired staff and assigned them the e-mail — person@company-a.com, we can create E-mail aliases like person@product-b.com and person@product-c.com. By doing this, all E-mails sent to person@product-b.com and person@product-c.com will land in person@company-a.com’s E-mail. Google provides this service at no extra cost. Google will also allow you to add up to 30 E-mail aliases for a user and I believe it’s a great way to save on E-mail costs — rather than creating multiple custom E-mails for a user, use an E-mail alias.

One caveat to using E-mail aliases is that all the additional domains used must belong to you and already be set up within your G-mail admin console. In other words, to use person@product-b.com and person@product-c.com as E-mail aliases, you must have added the MX records provided to you by Google to both the product-b.com and product-c.com domains.

How to set up an e-mail alias in your custom G-mail account

To set up an E-mail alias, in your Google Admin console, From the sidebar, Directory > Users > Click the User’s name > Add alternate Emails.

Setting up Groups in your custom Gmail account

G-mail groups allow you to send and receive E-mails as a group. This means that if someone is trying to communicate with a team within the organization, rather than trying to figure out all the members of that team and typing out their E-mails in the to field, you can simply reach everyone by E-mailing the group.

We currently use this for internal communication within our teams. If you’re trying to contact the sales team, rather than trying to figure out the E-mail address of each person on the team, you can simply E-mail sales.team@moni.africa and everyone on the sales team will receive the E-mail in their company E-mail inbox.

How to set up groups

To set up group E-mails in G-mail, from your Google admin console dashboard, on the sidebar, navigate to Directory > Groups.

Hit the Create Group button, give your group a name and an E-mail address. The E-mail address should be one that you haven’t assigned to any users in your list. The final step is the Group settings. Here, you can decide what kind of access group members will have and whether or not external e-mails can communicate with this group E-mail. The default settings are fine if you want only people within the organisation to be able to send E-mails to the group.

If you want people outside the organization to also be able to E-mail a group, you’d need to update the group settings. The only change you need to make is to turn on the Publish Posts setting for external users.

Click next and then hit the done button.

After hitting the Done button, you’ll see options to add members to the group. You can only add members who are already on your User list.