How can I route a “copy” of all outgoing emails from this domain to the same offsite email address?
Note: Google apps outbound email server is the primary and only server available.

- dave

1) when using google-apps you always have the option to send any non-provisioned email addressed mail to ‘somewhere’ they call it a ‘catch-all’ address but can be any user. I make a user that is actually called ‘catchall’ for this purpose. catchall@example.com

2) the built-in migration tool is only available to premier g.apps customers, but it is an IMAP mass-migration tool that will let you go from *any* IMAP anywhere to any g.apps premier account.. that first *any* can be coincidentally a g.apps account premier or not; allowing you to move an entire imap account to-from a catch-all or temporary account.

If you don’t have premium there are other tools for imap migration and you can always use pop with non-premium accounts to pull off the same trick. when you first enable pop for any g.apps account it asks ‘for all mail’ or for ‘just new mail’. pick all mail and the first pop access to that account will include everything.

in the context of the original post; ‘what to do with past employee email’…

eg:

bob@company.com is no longer at company.com

you use the email migration tool and migrate all bob@company.com to catchall@company.com and set up a filter at catchall@ to put any “to:bob@company.com” archived and put into bob/in label.. and any “from:bob@company.com” archived and labeled bob/sent.

really no limit to how many users can be set up that way, so you can keep dozens of ex-empl. around, manage their in/out boxes without taking up any add’l user accounts.

when ‘jim@company.com’ is hired to take place of bob@company.com and needs access to those emails.. migrate the other way. you migrate from catchall@ to jim@ but tell the migration tool that the imap root directory is ‘bob’ and skip the inbox and you’ll just get the bob@ in and out mails.

with non-premium not much point to this exercise since you get to keep 50 or 100 accounts, but still can be a better management of ex-empl. you’d have to use the pop-access option to make it work, and not sure how you’d filter out just the one account when pulling OUT of the mass mailbox.

for things to work pretty you need to enable labs option ‘advanced imap’ so you can turn some folders on/off in visible in imap; which all users should do anyhow if using imap to read mail; there is zero point zero use for the ‘starred’ or ‘all mail’. mailboxes from an imap reading viepoint.

you can email me if you have more questions. (any post here comes to my email automatically)

-awr

Can you be more specific please? Steps would help a lot!

Thanks
Bryan

when i set up any g.apps account i make a ‘catch all’ address that ‘catches’ any email whatsoever; when i had my own internal server i didn’t keep ’550′ emails; but it’s really nice for when somebody ‘swears’ they sent you and email and they did but the typo’d the name!

so; set up a catch-all email address and when a user leaves the company etc; you use the built-in migration tool and set it up to IMAP all the files to the ‘catch all’ address.

on the catch-all address; set up filters for in/out for any ‘archived’ user and they will each still have an inbox and outbox. you can get in-touch with me if you want more information; i will get an email if you post a reply.

coincidentally i just found this post because the same client finally is having me migrate all the users BACK to individual accounts. The system of the 8-in-one works so well ; a smaller company could easily have ONE or TWO g-apps-premier users and host 5-15 people.

now that the users are back to individual accounts; i’m leaving the ‘catch all’ as is; it will continue to grab a copy of every incoming and outgoing email for the whole company; it’s very powerful admin tool to track how many total emails going in/out etc and to get a very quick idea of which emails are going to 5 vs 2 vs 1 user.

it’s pretty much flawless; the one and only minor drawback is that outgoing emails are tagged with a header that you are using catchall as the sender (but doesn’t affect replies; the ‘from’ is undisturbed once you validate the user; before validating; gmail actually changes the ‘from’ to catchall@ in this case.

actually it’s not even a bad thing in a way; the extra header usually makes non-deliveries go back to the catchall and not the end user; so one admin. can follow many of those bounces w/o checking individual accounts!

-awr

The archival feature pretty much does what you would expect it to and not a whole lot more. Mail gets archived.. Mail can be searched for.. Mail can be exported to PSTs. My only real complaint with it is that it can be sloooowwwww..

If you are thinking of going the Postini route you might want to call ‘em up and ask for an interactive demo… See if the setup makes sense to you before you pull that trigger. It isn’t over priced, but it certainly is not cheap.