Does Your Startup Use Google Apps? When People Send You Emails, They Bounce
Does Your Startup Use Google Apps? When People Send You Emails, They Bounce.
There’s a pretty good chance other startups can’t send you emailsNote: make sure your SPF records are configured correctly.When we started Kato, we used my grandfathered-in free Google Apps account. We created a bunch of group email addresses, such as billing@, contact@, support@, and began courting potential customers.Eventually some people took out credit cards and bought Kato subscriptions. When they had questions about billing, they’d send an email to billing@kato.im. The problem was: some of those emails were bouncing.We tried emailing billing@kato.im and it worked. So it was intermittently failing somehow. Surely it was because we had a free Google Apps account, we thought.We figured Google probably doesn’t care much about free accounts, so we signed up for Google Apps, for real. Took out a credit card.We got everything setup, group emails recreated, all good. A few days go by and we get a message from a customer in Kato support room: “heads up, my email to billing@kato.im just bounced”.This time we got worried—this was a problem that money was suppose to fix.Of course, I searched and searched all along for the answer, but nothing coherent appeared. Just miles and miles of garbage on HTML pages with URLs ending in .py.So I filed a bug with Google. That’s right.They called me a lot. They were very nice (they called from Canada). I forwarded bounced emails and SMTP headers. They promised. I waited. I told them that it was incomprehensible. “But how could this be?” I implored, repeatedly.Eventually, with some accidental hints from Google support, I figured it out.Here’s how to “fix” this:Part 1Ask your friends at a friendly startup that uses Google Apps to send an email to your <hello>@<your startup> group address. Tell them to call, IM, or direct-email if they get a permanent failure bounce. Once they do (and they probably will), read on.Upgrade to paid Google Apps. Sorry.Go to “Manage this domain”. Go to “Google Apps”.Click on the left-most icon (“Add services”):Part 2Find “Groups For Business”, install. Once installed, it should look like this:Part 3Delete your existing groups. Be merciless here.Go to http://groups.google.com/a/<your domain>Re-create your groups. Set “Who can post” to Public.In each group, go to Manage->Settings->Moderation->Spam messages, and set it to “Skip the moderation queue and post to the group”Ask your friend to send you another email to <hello>@<your startup>. It should work now.Note: Medium doesn’t let you insert images into <ol> elements, hence three parts.Part 4Still want a free Google Apps account? Here are instructions from our readers:If you have a free gApps account- opt in to the 30 days trial for gApp for business- follow the steps from your article to set up your group- downgrade (deactivate) gApp for business back to gApp free version→ Your group will keep the settings and sending emails to the group email addresses will keep working as expected.As a part of my job, I frequently engage with other startups by sending them an email to the address advertised on their Contact Us page. So far, all of my emails have bounced. These are VC-funded startups who pay for Google Apps. It’s insane! Right?