Gmail Group or Gmail Alias, what is the difference and when do you use them?

In this article, we will explore what a Google Suite shared mailbox is, and the pros and cons of using it versus a standalone mailbox.

Option A: Standalone Mailbox

As explained at the beginning of this article, the standard approach is to create a new G Suite user account and use a generic email address with it (ie - sales@yourcompany.org).

The Good:

• All emails sent to the address will be in one single Gmail inbox, anybody who has the credentials can access this account.
• This account can be used to log in to other websites and services, it can also be a good place to route all newsletters and email subscriptions for easy access in one place.

The Bad:

• You'll incur the costs of an additional G Suite account.
• It's not possible to properly audit who is accessing the account and what actions they took.
• Sharing of credentials is generally not considered best practice, also each time someone leaves your organization, you will need to change the password to secure the account.
• It's difficult to enable 2-step verification in this situation without the use of 3rd party tools, often at additional costs.

Where this would be used: You need a dedicated email account for scans generated by a copy machine, in this situation you would create an account such as scans@yourcompany.com

Option B: Alias Email

Create an alias to an already existing email account. For example, your head of sales might have the email address of jsmith@yourcompany.com you could create an alias of sales@yourcompany.com and all emails sent to the alias will go directly to jsmith@yourcompany.com. 

The Good:

• No additional incurred costs, since you are creating an alias to an existing G Suite account there is no need to purchase another.
• All emails are in one centralized inbox. The user jsmith@yourcompany.com only has to monitor one inbox.
• The user with the jsmith@yourcompany.com email account can send emails outbound as sales@yourcompany.com. 

The Bad:

• Anyone who needs emails addressed to sales@yourcompany.com will have to rely on the parent account owner (in this case jsmith@yourcompany.com) to forward them or they will need to be able to access the jsmith@yourcompany.com account. This adds possible security risks as well as inconveniences for all parties involved.
• You maybe be able to set up automatic forwarding rules to forward emails to other employees, but you must have a good knowledge of Gmail filters and this may be quite time-consuming to maintain.

Where this would be used: There is a single person in the sales department and nobody else needs to access those emails. Good for situations where you may want to provide a generic email address to new contacts.

Option C: Mailing Group

Set up a Google Group with an email address of sales@yourcompany.com.

The Good:

• No additional incurred costs - just like an alias, there is no additional cost to create a Google Group.
• It's simple to forward emails to any members of the group. This can even include people outside of your organization, very useful for non-profits and other organizations that work with many other organizations.
• You can assign users as group managers which will allow them to manage members from their own personal G Suite accounts.
• Google Groups includes built-in tools for easily managing shared file permissions, which are very useful if your group of users has many shared documents.

The Bad:

• No centralized storage of all emails to the group in a single inbox, in other words, no single account will have all of the emails. The message can however remain in the Google Group web interface as topics.
• You cannot use the email address to sign up for services or authenticate to other internet services as you can with a standard G Suite account. <-- No SSO

Where this would be used: If you have a "support" or "help" email, this can be useful to alert everybody on the support or help team that a new support request email came in.

Another scenario would be if you have a system that sends an email alert based on a trigger event and it can only send it to one email address. By using the group email, the email would then be copied to everybody in the Google Group.