How To Create Group Emails in Google Workspace (Gmail Collaborative Inbox)

What are Group Emails?

Group emails in Google Workspace allow you to create collaborative inboxes for specific members of your organization.

With Google collaborative emails, you can create groups to communicate internally with your team or external clients!

For example, you could set up a sales group, customer service group, or support group and send groups emails to those particular people.

This is what the email addresses will look like:

• customerservice@yourdomain.com
• sales@yourdomain.com
• support@yourdomain.com

In this tutorial, we’ll guide you through how to create group emails in Google Workspace.

Read More: Google Workspace Tutorial for Beginners

Also Read: How to set up Google Workspace business email

Creating Group Emails within Google Workspace

Step 1: Create a Google Collaborative Inbox

To create a collaborative inbox in Google Workspace:

• Access your Gmail inbox or
• Head over to your browser and type in admin.google.com.
• Navigate over to Google Apps in the upper-right corner (refer to the screenshot).
• Scroll down and click ‘Admin’.

Once you’ve signed in to your account:

• You’ll get redirected to your Google Admin dashboard.
• Hover your cursor to the left-hand side menu and select ‘Groups’ under ‘Directory’.
• Click ‘Create group’.
• Fill in the  group name, description, group email, and group owner.

It’s important to mention that your group email should be similar to your group name.

For this Gmail collaborative inbox tutorial, we’re going to create a customer support group email.

By creating this collaborative inbox, existing and potential customers can reach out to you with queries and issues!

• Make sure that your domain is correct.
• Carefully select the group owners (as they’re responsible for controlling the group settings).
• Click ‘Next’.

Also read: How to choose a domain name for local business

Step 2: Modifying the Group Settings

The next step to create a group email is to simply modify the settings and the level of access contol group members have.

Now, proceed with the steps below:

• Click on ‘Team’ under ‘Access type’.

• Under ‘Access settings’ and next to ‘Contact owners’, choose which members of the group are allowed to contact our owners.

For this Gmail collaborative inbox tutorial, we’re going to deselect ‘entire organization’, ‘group members’, and ‘external’, so that they won’t be able to contact our owners.

Additionally, we’re going to keep ‘group members’ and ‘group owners’ selected [refer to the screengrab].

• Below ‘Contact owners’, you have the ‘View members’ setting. 
• Select who has access to view members within this group email.

We’ll deselect ‘entire organization’ and keep everything else selected.

• Below ‘View members’, we have the ‘View conversations’ setting.

This is where you can decide who views your conversations within this group.

Since our example is for a customer support collaborative inbox, we don’t want the entire organization or external clients to view our conversations. 

Therefore, we’ll deselect those, meaning only people within this group will be able to view the conversations.

• At last, you have the ‘Publish posts’ setting.

Since this customer support collaborative inbox has been created to support prospects and clients, they should be able to send emails to this address.

For this reason, we will select ‘external’ along with all other options.

• Under ‘Membership settings’, we want to make sure that only group managers and group owners are able to add, approve, and invite new members to the email group.

However, you can change these settings if you want.

For example, you might can deselect ‘group managers’ if you don’t want to give them that power.

• Scroll down to ‘Who can join the group’.
• Select the ‘Only invited users’ option.
• Below that, you’ll find the ‘Allow members outside your organization’ option.
• It’s recommended to keep it turned off if you’re creating an internal Google business email group.
• Once you’ve successfully modified all group settings, click ‘Create Group’.
• Click ‘See group details for Customer Support’.

And your Google Workspace collaborative inbox has now been created!

You can now start adding members to your email group.

Read more: How to set up Google Workspace SPF, DKIM & DMARC

Step 3: Navigating the Advanced Settings

It’s time to further customize the settings of your newly created Google business email group.

To do so:

• In ‘Access Settings’, select the ‘advanced settings’ link at the bottom of the page.

Now, we just need to tweak a few settings while leaving everything else the same.

• Point your cursor to ‘Enable additional Google Groups features’.
• Select ‘Collaborative inbox’.

A lot of the other information that you see on the screen has already been customized.

• Scroll down until you find ‘Conversation history’.
• Keep it turned on.
• Under ‘Who can reply privately to authors’, select the ‘Group members’ option.
• Scroll down the page again and make sure that the ‘Default sender’ information is correct.

This means that when members post in the group, they can do so with either their own email address or the group email address. 

• Select ‘Author’s address’ or ‘Group address’.

Author’s address means you can identify the sender’s email address, and Group address means that individuals can post using the group email address.

It’s important to note that members will be able to switch between the two options.

• Navigate down to ‘Spam message handling’.
• Select ‘Post suspicious messages to the group’ from the drop-down.

This is to ensure that all emails are coming into your Gmail collaborative inbox.

If you set up a spam filter, some important emails can be mistakenly marked as ‘spam’ and therefore will automatically go into your spam folder.

• Scroll down to ‘Email options’ and enter the subject prefix (which is generally the name of the email group).

We’re going to add ‘[customer-support]’ as the prefix (refer to the screengrab).

This is necessary so that people don’t get confused when they’re part of multiple groups!

• You can also choose to add an email footer if needed.

• Under ‘Auto replies’, check the box that says ‘Enable auto-reply to non-members outside the organization’.

These are customers and potential customers that need to get in touch with our support team.

• In the field provided, add an auto-reply message. 
• You can do the same for members inside your organization depending on the nature of the group.

For example, another department may need to get in touch with customer support if they have an issue.

• Once you’ve navigated through the advanced settings, click ‘Save changes’ .
• You’ll then arrive at your Gmail inbox.

Okay, so how do you send emails to your newly created Google Workspace collaborative inbox?

Simply:

• In the ‘To’ field, type in ‘customer’ and select the customer support group from the drop-down.
• Select Google Apps > Groups to see all the group emails created within Google Workspace.

You’ll also be able to see the conversations within each of these groups.

• Simply click ‘New Conversation’ in the upper-left corner to begin a new conversation.

Also Read: BEST Email Marketing Software

Google Collaborative Inbox Tutorial (Video Guide)

This concludes our tutorial on how to create group emails with Google Workspace.

If you’re a total beginner, we have a video tutorial just for you!

After watching the video if you still have any questions, feedback or comments, feel free to add those below.

However, we hope you can now confidently set up and use your Gmail collaborative inbox!