Google Groups and who can send

[Simon Wright]

I'm thinking this isn't possible as i haven't found a solution yet...

So we have google groups for the different year levels and house groups, basically distribution groups.

I want staff to be able to email said groups but not the students (members). The only way to enable this is to allow the 'Entire Organization' which inherently allows group members.

I cant add group (staff) as Group Managers.

Really just trying to prevent students spamming each other, which doesn't happen often, but does happen.

Thoughts?

I really don't want to roll my own mailing lists.

Regards,

Simon Wright

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[Bill Wilde]

Hi

We had the same issue with our year-level groups.  Our solution was to block Members from posting, and then add staff to the group as Managers.  As managers, they can post.  I used GAM to add staff in, either as a group, or as individuals (eg SLT are the only ones who can use our Caregivers email groups).  The disadvantage of that approach is that staff, as managers, get emails sent to the groups.

YMMV

Bill Wilde

ICT Technician

Newlands College

WELLINGTON

(04) 474 1333 (DDI)

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[Jonathan Churton]

Crossed this problem before.. We roll our own mailing groups. We have things setup as follows.

Year Level Groups - Require admin approval.

Global Student Group - Require admin approval.

House Groups - Teachers of the house group can send.

Individual Classes - Teacher is manager and can send.

You could look at making the Dean(s) for each year level the moderator for their year group. Maybe look at allocating a teacher for each house group as moderator?

Cheers,

Jonathan.

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Jonathan Churton

Senior ICT Systems Engineer

Lighting and Sound Engineer

Wellington High School

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[Daniel Lewis]

We are doing something similar this way:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9175444?hl=en

We flag all student emails with a 'student' tag (students are in their own OU)

If an email with a student tag is sent to a group it is rejected.

They can bypass this using google group web posting - so that needs to be disabled for everyone.

I have a master group list with all groups I want to block and only apply the block to that master group list. *need to remember to add new groups to this list or set up a script.

I've attached some screenshots below if it helps.

Hopefully it works in your case.

Daniel

On Fri, 2 May 2025 at 09:43, Bill Wilde <bwi...@newlands.school.nz> wrote:

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[Dael Sutton]

Hi Simon.

One of those group permissions allows owners & managers only of the group(s) to send to them.  We use this method.  If you sync your groups from AD/LDAP to Google, just make the relevant staff owners of the group in your directory and then set that permission on the group in Google, and the students can't spam to them. I haven't checked yet, but I'm fairly sure GAM can set those ownerships if you're not sync'ing the groups over from another directory.

For our big student groups (entire year level, entire subject {all 10ENG students etc}, entire division etc), we have those limited even further to a smaller subset of staff (SLT, Guidance, Deans, department heads) so that those big groups don't get abused by staff, too.

D.

[Simon Wright]

Thanks Dael,

I want pretty much the entirety of the staff to be able to email these groups, but you can't add another group as a manager. Even if programmatically adding staff (imagingin it to be a bit of a nightmare to maintain) as Bill mentioned, the Managers will also get the emails.

I'm really liking Daniel's solution, so I will have a go with that.

Thinking about it, permissions for most of google can be tuned based on the OU, yet the Groups aren't....

Thanks all for your wisdom.

Regards,

Simon Wright

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[Simon Wright]

Hmm, well i've got the student emails being tagged with the custom header, but the rejection side aint working, so i'm spamming the students :)

I thought I figured it out, in that I was missing a space in the regex. tested it with the header copied out of one of the emails and it matches.

Not getting the response that it was rejected, so I have to use the audit/investigation tool and purge those emails each time i test.

Daniel, can you see anything i've missed here?

I created the content compliance at the top level OU

Ive just added the groups individually for the meantime

Under the top level Student OU

Regards,

Simon Wright

[Daniel Lewis]

Looks ok from what I can see.

custom header in student OU:

regex in top level compliance check:

^X-user-type: (student)$

The block message looks like the following:

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[Simon Wright]

Yip, the header is applying

Regex is exactly the same as yours and it does match...

I'll keep playing/spamming

Regards,

Simon Wright

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[Jake Wills]

We had a small issue with our one, where while the students couldn't email the group... they could add the group into Google Chat... and so suddenly we had a whole school google chat blowing up all the kids devices!

[Simon Wright]

Finally got back to this, only because a student was spamming the student groups again...

Actually got it to work!

Had to change affected account types to Users, not Groups as what Daniel had. Daniel, are you sure yours is working with Groups checked and not Users?

I've sent several emails to various groups and run the auditing tool, and they are not ending up in all the users (of the groups) inbox, though they do still end up in the group feed if you go to google groups site.

I did try also ticking groups again (both user and groups checked) to see if that would stop the email from going into the group feed, but it appears to not make a difference, so I have no idea what the 'groups' option actually affects.

Also, with the reject message, that doesn't seem to be coming back to my test users account, so I don't know where it ends up. Would be nice for the student to get that message.

Regardless, its stopping students from spamming each other, so that's a win for a Friday.

Regards,

Simon Wright

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[Simon Wright]

Scrap my last response.

Ticking users seemed to have actually stopped students sending any internal emails, so I'm back to square one again.

I'm at a loss as to why this works for Daniel and not me.

Simon.

[Daniel Lewis]

I'll review my settings. Possibly an important piece of the puzzle I have done and forgotten about.

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[Simon Wright]

Thanks Daniel for the off list help, it works!

So the trick in the end was to add the groups you want to block students from sending to, need to be in a group and that group is the one listed in the settings.

Weird that you can just list the groups individually, but it works so onto other issues.

Regards,

Simon Wright

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