Groups API sometimes adds members and replaces the emails weirdly

[Alexander Kolodziej]

We have a domain (lets say its: "domain.com") at Google Apps. Have created all ~110 accounts via the provisioning API. All that went well.

So i created all the email groups that we should have (around 100 groups, but most of them are simple email aliases from another domain) via the Groups API.

Seemed to have worked fine at first glance. The 100 groups have in total around 200 members.

But when i looked closer at the members of all groups, i can see that a few members have weird email values.

One person for some reason got added with his _personal_ gmail account, even though that email is nowhere to be found in the input-data to the API-scripts.

Another 2 persons got added with a very strange email that also doesnt exist in the input-data. Looks like this: "givenname.surname%domai...@gtempaccount.com", where in fact should have been the more normal "givennam...@domain.com".

(see attached file)

So this has only affected 3 people (out of 110).

And it has affected perhaps 6-7 members in the various groups (these persons are added to more than one group).

And, furthermore, these persons do NOT have this erroneous email in all groups where they are members.

The groups were created before those user accounts got created. But on the other hand, almost all of those 110 users were created after the groups were created, and only these 3 persons got affected.

So in a few of the cases i removed the members from the groups, and tried to add them again (both using the web-admin-interface, and using the Groups API again), and i could not recreate the problem.

Its like there was some freak burst of intelligence-gone-wrong in the Groups API:)

What could possibly cause this?

Is there something special i should think about when using the Groups API?

Does the API try to "resolve" the members that i want to add somehow?

Any help?

ps. Does there exist some Groups-API-specific google-group? The support just gave me a link to this group/forum.

[Alexander Kolodziej]

Ok, now that i have had time to look at this a bit more, some new info.

Its around 110 groups, with 550 members in total (around 110 unique members).

As far as i can tell the groups got created just fine.

It was only after (i think) i added all the user accounts to the domain that the problems started.

(i created the groups first)

And it was more than just 3-4 people that got affected. It was around 10 people (translates to around 30 member entries in the groups).

Now, i have finally (...) found out about the "conflicting accounts" problem with google accounts.

And sure, its a problem that people may have to rename a few other accounts, but...

why indeed did the member-entries in the groups that i created get swapped out and replaced by

the temp-accounts that got created for the affected users, or... even weirder, got replaced by their _personal_

email adresses??

For the "@gtempaccount" case i can make some kind of automated check. Its easy enough to look for those

emails with a script that uses the groups API.

But i wont be able to find any _personal_ emails in the groups, since those look like any valid email does.

So, does anyone care to guess if this problem only occurs when users are added to a domain _after_ their 

email has been added to a group (if so, then a cleanup now should be enough), or...

can this happen at any time when a user in the domain tries to create some sort of conflicting account

in some of googles services?

  wbr / Alex

[bobpuffer]

I'd just venture to say that in my experience Google will always substitute a primary google account for any alias that's put forth for membership.