Google Apps Groups, Contact groups, Email lists …??

Email Lists, Groups, Contact Groups are all different ways to say the same thing: a collection of email addresses under one heading or title. For the Google Apps (or Gmail) user, the differences between these and what to call each can be confusing, so I want to explain each in detail.

First we’ll start with Contact Groups. We’re going to call these Personal Contact Groups, which is a more accurate title in my opinion. This is the feature that both Google Apps and regular Gmail users share. When you’re logged into Gmail and click on Contacts, your Personal Contact Groups are listed in the first pane. This list starts out with the pseudo groups My Contacts (which lists all of your contacts) and Most Contacted (which shows what it says), which is then followed by a list of any Personal Contact Groups that you’ve created. The list ends with another pseudo and automatic group called Suggested Contacts (more on this one later). The reason I call these pseudo groups is that you can’t send a message, using My Contacts as the recipient, and expect it to send the email to all of your contacts. These pseudo groups just give you different viewing options for your personal contacts.

Let’s touch on what the Suggested Contacts group is about. This group is automatically filled with email addresses from people you’ve sent a message to but aren’t listed under My Contacts. This is also the place where new users to your Google Apps domain will show up. For instance, if you have a new person starting at your company and your administrator adds them to Google Apps, their name and email address will automatically be added to your Suggested Contacts group. It’s up to you, the user, whether you want to keep them there, delete them, or select them and hit the Move to My Contacts button. Once they’re in your contacts, you can add phone numbers and other information to the contact as you see fit.

When sending to your Personal Contact Groups, you can start typing the name of the Contact Group in the To: field of an email. Gmail’s auto-complete will show the name of the Contact Group with (group) listed behind it. When you select it, Gmail doesn’t actually list the Contact Group name in your To: field, but fills in the email addresses of the members of that Contact Group.

Moving along, we have Email Lists. This is exclusive to Google Apps domains and are created and maintained by your administrator. Google is also in the process of merging all Email Lists into their new Groups tool that we’ll talk about next. These are just basic, domain-wide email lists that can only include members of your domain. If the email list is setup with the option of “Include Everyone in my Domain”, only domain administrators can send messages to that list. You can see the limitations already, which is one of the reasons why Google is changing all email lists into Groups.

Now we have Groups. Like Email Lists, these are created by administrators and are domain-wide. The difference is that the administrator can now set the security for sending email to each group. If you want an email group that only administrators can send messages to, you can have that. If you want the group to be public so that anyone from anywhere could send to it, you can do that too. An example would be a group with the email address of that has all of your sales team as members. You can also add external email addresses to these groups. There are different permission options for a group that controls who can send to it. Public allows anyone in the world to sent to it, Announcement allows only group owners to send email to it, and Team allows only people within your domain to be able to send to it. You also can go more granular and customize the permissions in case you want only members of a certain group to send messages to it - in other words, if you’re not a member or an owner in the group, you can’t send messages to it. And yes, groups can be apart of other groups here too.

Also, groups can act as security groups when sharing videos and sites (docs and other sharing is coming in the future). This means that if you want to share a video with everyone in a Media group for example, everyone who is in that group will get access. If a new person is added to the group, they automatically have access to all the videos and sites that the Media group has access to. If a person is removed from that group, their access is taken away. The one caveat is that external email addresses will not gain access to your videos, even if they are apart of the group that has been granted access. Videos can only be shared within your domain.