Forward mail for users via API

[Paul Chauvet]

Hi all,

I'm preparing a domain for my college.  We're moving email to Google Apps but will want to setup a forwarding address for about 10% of our accounts (i.e. mail would be sent back FROM google TO a locally hosted domain).

How can I do this?  Via the Python API I see the following:

client.UpdateForwarding(username='ben', enable=True, forward_to='b.s...@example.com', action='ARCHIVE')

Which would be great, but it fails.  The documentation stipulates (assuming b.s...@example.com is an already-verified forwarding address).  Is there any way to bypass this?  Alternatively, since all of the destination addresses that we would be forwarding to are controlled by us, is there a way to 'pre-verify' addresses?

Any advice or suggestions you have would be much appreciated.  My apologies if this has already been asked, but I couldn't find any reference to this issue.

- Paul

[Jay Lee]

If the domain isn't already a Google Apps domain, you could add it to your Google Apps account as a secondary domain (without actually changing the MX records for the domain). Once you verify ownership of the domain, you should then be able to add the forward rules.

Jay

[David Haley]

Hi,

Alternatively, you can sign up for Google Message Security, which includes not only anti-spam and anti-virus protection etc., but also various email routing tools whereby you can route email for some users to one server and email for other users to another server -- and then skip all the messing around with the API. It's heavily discounted for educational institutions although you'd have to contact Google Sales to get more information about that.

Cheers,
- David

[Paul Chauvet]

Sorry - been so overwhelmed I forgot to respond.

The alias fixed the issue.  Thanks much for pointing me in the right direction Jay.

As for Google Message Security, I will look into that.  Other than that one issue, the API hasn't been any problem for me though.  Its very well documented (at least in the tasks that I've dealt with so far).