Inability to delete secondary email addresses / aliases - Solved

[Ethan Schoonover]

I spent *quite* a bit of time on this and the solution is trivial, so I wanted to record it here. I found several related threads in this GAM forum but most were pretty old and none detailed a working solution and I didn't want to necrobump them.

ISSUE:

Google Apps *sometimes* demonstrates buggy behavior when trying to delete *or alter* the "secondary email" shown in user accounts in the admin UI. Specifically, deleting and even attempting to change the address fails and you are left with what seems to be an unalterable secondary email.

RELATED TO:

Possibly related to the situations where the email address value in that field is no longer valid for the domain? I mention this because of the specifics of the situation I faced (next section below).

SPECIFIC CASE:

The GAPPS account I was working on had a primary domain and a domain alias that was unused (but which was of course polluting autocomplete results in gmail). I removed the unused domain alias. However all the secondary emails in the domain remained as USERNAME @ ALREADY_DELETED_ALIAS . DOMAIN . COM. It would have been nice if GAPPS had offered to remove those when the domain alias was removed, but I figured I'd just do it with GAM. No joy. Even the UI in GAPPS admin failed as noted above.

SOLUTION (UI and GAM):

Create a new (even temporary) alias for the affected users. GAPPS will repopulate the secondary email field with the new (valid) alias. You can then remove the (temporary) email alias immediately and will be left with a blank secondary email.

In gam, you can just run a bulk update on the affected (or all) user accounts like this:

gam create alias TEMPALIAS user USERNAME

# followed immediately by

gam delete alias TEMPALIAS

That should leave you with, at the very least, a working secondary email (if they had other good aliases) or an empty secondary email field (if they had no other aliases).

-Ethan