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Google Complaint: Google Apps Groups doesn't have a reply-to field

Posted by james on

I have a google apps for one of the domains I run, and I created a couple lists. Great! It looks like a typical email list, so I think I'm set. Then I realize that whenever someone sends a message, it's going to the list from their email... However, whenever anyone responds it only goes back to the author, not to the group. That's not how you normally want an email list to work, so I look for the setting that's in almost every mailing list out there... the reply-to field. Usually the list itself has a setting whether you want users to automatically reply to the list, or to the original author. The default is usually the list, since this makes no sense at all.

However, Google Apps Groups are missing this feature. There are a lot of complaints and requests about this dating back a while, but no word from Google so far (besides one staff worker that promised a fix within 24 hours... a couple months ago). So fine, go into my gmail and manually set my reply-to on the message I'm setting...

And I can't set the reply-to on my gmail account! You can give a certain FROM email a reply-to address, but you can't do this on a message by message basis, it has to be specific to the FROM email. Since I don't want every email I send out being replied to the completely unrelated google apps group email, I want to have two identities: user@domain with no reply-to (normal email), and user@domain with a group_email@domain reply-to (for my mailing list stuff). I can't do it. Google complains "That email is already in the list", and you can't add another FROM account with that reply-to.

Google is really amazing, but I'm continually shocked how disorganized and nonsensical their feature list can be. A email list with no reply-to support? Completely inflexible reply-to support in gmail? It's one thing when a product is being created and things are incomplete. It's another when they're made half-way and then just stay in that half incomplete stage. That's where google seems to be with most of their apps right now. It's a shame, they've done what every other companies does; stagnate when they get big/successful. Time to create another google-like company with a new motto; "Don't be evil, but also make good stuff."