Determining Google Group activity

[Todd Biggins]

We have 446 google groups in our domain and I'm trying to find out which ones are being used so we can consolidate or kill the old ones.

Is there a clever way with GAM to get a quick look of which of these groups has either sent or received at least one email in X days?

I know this isn't a full proof of which lists are actively used for some purpose, but it would give a much narrower subset to review.

Some of them have archiving turned on, but others don't.

I'm thinking you might be able to search by user mailboxes (assuming the user is a member with email being sent to them), and see that it comes from or is sent to one of the list:gro...@akrf.com addresses

In Vault (if you have it) you can search for terms - so you could do (e.g.):

list:some...@domain.com OR list:someth...@domain.com OR [..]

but that will only return which users' mailboxes came up - there's no easy way to split off which list(s) the messages came from.

In GACP you can do an Email log search, but again, you have to be specific on sender or recipient and there's no quick way to check 446 lists.

Any thoughts (and even better, syntax example) would be gratefully appreciated!

[Jay Lee]

I don't think GAM can help much here. The best method I've seen is to review:

https://groups.google.com/a/<YOURDOMAIN.COM>/forum/#!forumsearch/

each group will show info like how many topics there have been and when the last email post was. This gives you an idea of group usage as a distribution list but be aware even though there's no email activity the group may be being used for Drive file ACLs, etc.

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[Steve Larsen]

This came up a couple times in the last week for me and I also found that you could use a few other methods for this

Look at the rss/atom feed of the group for the last message date

https://groups.google.com/a/<your-domain>/forum/feed/<your-group>/msgs/atom.xml?num=1

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[Bradley Stinson]

You could get an idea using BigQuery and it would be a lot faster and less tedious than looking at the forums or RSS feeds.

https://support.google.com/a/topic/7233311?hl=en&ref_topic=2683886

https://support.google.com/a/answer/7233312?hl=en

Using something like what I have below.

#LegacySql
SELECT message_info.destination.address , message_info.destination.service, COUNT (message_info.destination.address)
FROM (TABLE_DATE_RANGE([gmail_logs_dataset.daily_],
      DATE_ADD(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), -180, 'DAY'),
      CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()))

WHERE (message_info.destination.address LIKE '%<yourDomainHere>'
OR  message_info.destination.address LIKE '%<AnotherOneOfYourDomainsHere>'

AND message_info.is_spam = False)
AND message_info.destination.service = 'mailing-list'

GROUP BY message_info.destination.address, message_info.destination.service

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[Dan Schwartz]

I'd just like to +1 to Jay's comment, that some people also use groups for google drive/file/doc access and calendar shares, in addition to mail.

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Dan Schwartz | LTS - Systems Engineering  | Lehigh University | da...@lehigh.edu | (610) 758-5061

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[Steve - DynTech]

Daniel - The new group tagging feature should help with this.

Bradley - BigQuery was the other solution we thought of but I didn't have the query to share :)

One thing I did find out as part of this with those BigQuery logs is that they are set to expire after 60 days if you don't change the default table expiration time!!!

Something google failed to mention early in the days https://web.archive.org/web/20170313082603/https://support.google.com/a/answer/7233312

I'm thinking you might be able to search by user mailboxes (assuming the user is a member with email being sent to them), and see that it comes from or is sent to one of the list:...@akrf.com addresses

In Vault (if you have it) you can search for terms - so you could do (e.g.):

list:so...@domain.com OR list:some...@domain.com OR [..]

but that will only return which users' mailboxes came up - there's no easy way to split off which list(s) the messages came from.

[Paul Swanson]

I just saw this thread and I'm trying to export our Google Workspace activity to BigQuery. However, when I set it up I am getting a "Failed to save!" message. I can see an empty dataset in BigQuery, but there the export still shows Not Enabled and there is no actual data.

Any ideas??

Thanks,

Paul

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