Keeping Copies of Group Emails

One of the things that's a bit ghetto of groups in Google Apps is that groups are really just a glorified alias file. Users cannot manage their subscription, get emails delivered in batches, and there's no message archive unlike Google Groups or a Mailman managed list. And this is the same problem with Microsoft Exchange (at least up to 2007, probably 2010 too).

Okay, so ranting aside, here's a couple quick hacks to squeeze a couple features out of groups in GA.

Archiving. Create a mailbox, add it to the group. Shazzam! This is better in Exchange were you can share that mailbox easily with many users and limit them to read-only access so people aren't deleting your archive.

Mailing list features. Well, you're only answer for now is going to be to forward messages to a mailing list. So point mylist@example.com to mylist-example-com@googlegroups.com and members should subscribe directly to the Google Group instead.

Aliases. Now this is one feature I would have preferred in the face of the above limitations of GA groups. That is, if I've got a group called "hibuddy@example.com", I also want to have "heybuddy@example.com" and other variations. So here, create a mailbox called "hibuddy@example.com" and rename (or create) a group called "hibuddy-group@example.com". You can add as many aliases as you want to the mailbox, and then configure that mailbox to just forward to the group.

Ciao
- Arch

SpamAssassin

On previous mail server setups, I've tried to pass all mail coming into the server through SpamAssassin (The Fight Against Spam) and it's a bit of a struggle to get it working sometimes so I've had nothing setup for a while other than some SMTP restrictions and a couple of the RBLs. So since SpamAssassin is generally geared to being run / configured per-user, I figured, what the hell, I'll try that. And it is way easier. All I did was plop this in my .procmailrc:

# SpamAssassin
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
| /usr/bin/spamassassin

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
Junk

So now, SA happily tags all my possibly spammy mail and then for actual spam, it dumps it in the Junk folder and it actually strips the content replacing it with all the reasons why the message was identified as spam (the original message is attached).

So far so good!

- Arch