How to make Google group members see all sent mail from the group?

Question

The scenario is this:

I have a Google group; let's call it [email protected]. Anyone can send email to this group. The group has 2 members, [email protected] and [email protected]. Both personA and personB has [email protected] set up as an additional email address in Gmail settings with "Treat as an alias" checked. This means that both personA and personB gets mail sent to the support group in their own personal inboxes, and can reply as "[email protected]". So far so good.

The issue I have is that if [email protected] sends a mail to [email protected], and personA replies to this mail using the [email protected] alias, personB gets no indication that personA has replied to the mail, personB can't see the mail that personA sent as a reply to personX anywhere. Vice-versa obviously also applies if personB replies.

How can I fix this so that the group members can see all sent mail from the group, regardless of which group member sent it?

Both group members also use the Outlook mail client if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

It's not possible to ensure this the way you are currently using Google Groups. Since the incoming email is being distributed to the group members with the sender's address intact, there is nothing stopping any one member from sending a reply directly to the original sender.

What needs to happen for each of the group members to stay up-to-date on correspondence that has occurred from the group email is that any replies to a customer must be BCCd back to the group. So, if I'm personA and I click reply and set my "From" address as [email protected], I also need to BCC [email protected] on that reply. The reply will then be distributed to everyone else in the group, so they can see all the activity that has occurred on the thread.

It may be possible for you to configure personA's email client to do this automatically, but I don't know how that would be done in practice in Outlook so I'm going to say it's out of scope for this question ;-).

An alternative to this would be to disallow email distribution to group members and require all correspondence to be done through the Google groups web interface. There, you can alter your group settings so that no one is allowed to "reply privately" to the "topic author", so all replies are added to the thread visible to the group.

A more elegant, yet costly solution would be to use a third-party tool to manage this support address, and delegate actions on this address to your operators. There are TONS of players in this "support desk" space; one that I am a paying customer for is called FrontApp, and I like it because it offers a very email-centric workflow, kind of like adding "multiplayer" capabilities to your support inbox.

Answer 2

I just chatted with Google support about this question, and although the representative didn't have a clue which "Post replies" setting I was supposed to pick to achieve this goal, "Users decide where their replies are sent" works exactly as I intended.

To clarify.
The behavior with this setting (when I reply-all in a third-party email client at which I have configured my organization email address to receive a copy of messages sent to my group address) is that both the group address and the original author's address appear in the "To" field.

In the context of the example email addresses you gave in your question, [email protected] sends a mail to [email protected], and personA uses whatever email client they want (e.g., Outlook) and hits reply-all to this mail. Both [email protected] and [email protected] would appear in the To field of the new message. [email protected] would then see the reply, and so would personB since [email protected] was also a recipient of the response from personA.

Hope this helps!