Forwarding email from Google Apps at the admin level

January 5, 2016 5:27 PM

Is there a way to have an employee's email forwarded to another email in our business domain, at the admin level? Google Apps.

An employee had a medical emergency and doesn't have access to her email. We use Google Apps to run our business domain email, and I'm the admin. I don't have access to her password. We need to keep her account active, but have her email forward to another address in our domain so we can answer her email for her. There's no way to directly get into her account.

I understand that I can't set forwarding options from the admin level. I've tried setting a new routing address, which involved having the employee's email routed to an outside address (not associated with the domain), then setting that outside address's forward rules to forward to the new email. This doesn't work - apparently because Gmail believes I'm forwarding in a loop (correct me if I'm wrong).

Are there any options for having our employee's emails routed to us? It's not a privacy issue (this is a known policy in our organization in case of emergencies). Keep in mind we don't have direct access to her account. I'm not super familiar with admining a Google business domain, and have looked through help documents. Anything I'm not thinking of?

posted by Zosia Blue to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Response by poster: I should add that you *used* to be able to do this by creating a group & using the person's email as the group email, but doesn't look like this functionality exists anymore.
posted by Zosia Blue at 5:31 PM on January 5, 2016

If you're the admin, can't you reset her password and then do the necessary steps to forward the email?
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:54 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I don't believe Google allows you to do this; they seem to want to force you to do this from the use side, for whatever strange reasons Google has. See here.

The simplest solution is just to reset the employee's password form the admin side (on the user page, click the lock with circular arrow icon on the top right of the user info block, just beside the user's name). Then you can login to their account and set up forwarding.
posted by ssg at 5:56 PM on January 5, 2016

Response by poster: I tried resetting, but it required that I sign in with her original password to make a new one (which I don't have). I wasn't able to create a new password for her from the admin level - she would have to do it from the user level, after entering her original password. Let me know if I'm missing something.
posted by Zosia Blue at 5:57 PM on January 5, 2016

Response by poster: I figured out part of this for now. I was able to set up an outside email (Hotmail). I then added the Hotmail address as a routing address within Google Apps, then the Hotmail address is forwarding to a general email address in our domain. This will address any email our employee gets from outside our domain (which is the bulk). This does NOT address any email sent from within the domain.

Any email sent within our domain to the employee's address doesn't forward. I don't know a way around that one.
posted by Zosia Blue at 5:59 PM on January 5, 2016

Just for future reference, you should have access to the Administrator console for your domain. The console is at http://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.

Once you're logged in, you can click on Users, then the user in question, then the circle/lock icon on the right to force a password reset. You can set the password manually or auto-generate one. Then press Reset to finish the job.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:02 PM on January 5, 2016

Best answer: Are you sure you can't create a new password from the admin side? Just sign in to the admin console, select the user, and click the little password reset icon beside their name. Does that icon not appear for you?
posted by ssg at 6:10 PM on January 5, 2016

Response by poster: Oh. You're right. I was in the wrong place. I can reset it from the admin end. Thank you, everyone!
posted by Zosia Blue at 6:18 PM on January 5, 2016

You can do this directly, without all this work, by creating a routing rule in Google Apps. You can add additional recipients to receive mail sent to any account in Apps.

From the main console at admin.google.com, go to Apps ... Google Apps ... Gmail ... Default Routing.
posted by me & my monkey at 7:34 AM on January 6, 2016