Nested mailing lists in Google Apps
Monday 7 July 2008epiGenesys is still continuing our trial of Google Apps as a mail platform. In the last few days we identified a particularly important feature that appears to be missing from the service - the ability to nest mailing lists. This could be a perfectly reasonable design decision to prevent Google Apps users creating mail loops. Unfortunately, as we use nested mailing lists extensively, the lack of this feature would add to our administration overhead, which is precisely what we are trying to reduce by moving to Google Apps.
Not wanting to give up on this without a fight, since I am generally very impressed with the platform, I set about hunting for a solution, and luckily this turned out to be straightforward. It seems that whilst Google Apps does not allow nesting of lists within the primary domain, it is perfectly happy to allow nesting of lists within a domain alias. Therefore, all that is needed is to configure a subdomain (such as ‘lists.yourdomain.com’) as a domain alias, and then use the @lists.yourdomain.com address when nesting a list. Not exactly a perfect solution, but it gets the job done.
One Response to “Nested mailing lists in Google Apps”
Thank you! We found this annoying as well … the domain alias thing still isn’t perfect, but it’s so much better than editing users individually.
By Justin on Sep 4, 2008