How to monitor employees' emails?

Question

I run a business and for most part I've been doing all by myself. For the past year I've been working with another person so we used to cc each other in all emails in order to be always up to date with each and every order.

Things went well so far and I hired three other people. Thing is, they have just started and as much as I trust their capabilities I want to receive all sent and received emails at least until I know they can handle it all by themselves.

I arrange trips and events and contents vary a lot with mostly irregular requests that we have to find a way to work around. They still have a lot to learn and I can't just let them do it all.

Then again, I don't really want to ask them to put my (or my first coworker's) address in cc every single time they send out something.

Is there a way to either monitor all email or be put in bcc by default?

Or maybe this is the wrong way to do it and I should not be supervising all of it?

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Your coworkers can add you as their delegate, see Set up mail delegation from Google's documentation.

Then you'll be able to read mail that was sent to them.

This option requires each of your employees to explicitly set up you as their delegate.

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Another option is to modify the domain level routing. This will let you add an additional recipient for all messages that are sent from or received at your domain.

See https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084, and follow the steps as described:

• Initial step: Go to Gmail advanced settings in the Google Admin console
• Step 1: Enter email messages to affect
• Step 2: Set up an envelope filter
• On Step 3: Specify what happens to the messages you want to Add more recipients, and add your own email address.

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Yet another option is Google Vault, which can be set up to store all messages that enters or leaves your domain. However, Google Vault is more geared towards archiving and searching for a single messages or set of messages, not so much for receiving messages real time.

Answer 2

Another alternative is to set up a Google Group for business as a collaborative inbox. It will have the advantage of having forum-like features, and everyone will get copied on every email.

You can set yourself up as the administrator and assign or even reassign a particular thread (say, one thread for a particular event) and set topics or keywords for different threads

The net effect is that your customer will need only a single email address for your whole team. When email gets in, anyone can your business process, and also any member of your team may weigh in on any issue, however all responses get sent to your customer from this same particular address, avoiding issues like thread multiplication.

Also, you can permit your team members to use the web interface to groups or in the alternative, force everyone to use their own email client be it Gmail or whatever desktop client they are familiar with.

Additionally, Google groups for business get indexed to your domains cloud search plus, if you so desire, you may use Google Vault to keep an archive of all communications regardless if they have been deleted form the group or individual addresses

It's an alternative way easier to set up than special email routing, and a good fit for what you are trying to achieve