Email Monitor with Google Groups
Hi everyone,
Looking for some input from the community here. I've gotten some answers as far as what's going on, but want to know if anyone has faced a similar situation and has a good resolution.
So we're a Google shop, and naturally we have an address being monitored by the Email Monitor in TDX to create tickets when users email us. Users email a Google Group address, which then propagates the message to the IT team and to the email address that the Email Monitor is monitoring.
The problem is that depending on the sender's domain security settings (we routinely have senders from outside of our domain), Google Groups will send the email with the "From" field edited, so that the email appears to be coming from the Google Group address. Google Groups will also add a "Reply-To" field in the header. This is just a function of how Google Groups handles certain emails. So, when the Email Monitor picks up one of these emails, it reads the "From" part of the email header instead of "Reply-To," and sets the requestor email address as our Google Group email address instead of the sender's email address. This means that we cannot reply in the ticket that was created without manually adding the sender's address into the "Other Email Addresses" field. If we just reply to the requestor, it simply gets dead-ended at our Google Group address, since the Email Monitor doesn't check for a "Reply-To" field in the header of the original email that created the request in the first place, and therefore the "Reply-To" header information is lost when the email hits the Email Monitor.
Has anyone run into this issue with Google Groups, and come up with a good resolution? My only real thought at this point is to scrap the Group and have the email account that's monitored by the Email Monitor be the primary address that people send requests to, and then maybe forward them to the rest of the IT team from there if we want to receive the emails directly. It'd be a bummer to lose the convenience that Groups gives us though.
Thanks for any input.
Answer (1)
I suspect it depends on what value the current group adds, i.e. how it is used.
One solution might be to use a ticket creation webhook to use iPaaS or similar to extract the real requester from the ticket and update/patch the ticket with the correct information. Having said that, I don't think the "Reply-to" is anywhere in a email-generated ticket. To be honest, the functionality in email monitoring is pretty slender.
Not sure if this will help, but you can delegate GMail access to a group.
Perhaps the simplest is to create the Gmail monitored account, and have the GMail account forward to the group. TDX monitors the Gmail account and the group is just the existing members minus the monitor account now. I think in that scenario, the members of the group may be able to just hit reply because the "From" is kept intact with an automatic forwarding in Gmail.
Yeah, I was definitely leaning towards the last suggestion - have the monitored account forward to the group - but I didn't actually know about Gmail delegations. I'll do some homework on that and see if it gets me anywhere. Much appreciated. - Dana Faldasz Mon 6/26/23 2:54 PM