Managing Junk Mail in Google Groups

Are you getting mail through a group address? For example, you might be a member of a support or accounting group. Messages sent to that group may be sent to multiple people, or the group could only have one person at any given time, but the group is used for other reasons like having a general address for listings, closings, escrow, front desk, etc.

Just like our inboxes can get spam, these groups are frequent recipients of unsolicited messages. By default, messages that are suspected to be spam are put into a quarantine where they are held for review. This prevents the messages from getting into your inbox. Unfortunately it can also sometimes catch legitimate messages.

What if you’re not getting a message that was sent to the group?

• You can login to your group’s webpage at https://groups.google.com.
• Click My groups.
• Click on the group you’d like to open.
• On the top right, click Manage.
• Finally, on the left side bar, click Messages > Pending messages.

Note, that you must be a group manager or owner to see the pending messages. Typically these members will also get a weekly email with any pending messages for review.

From the list that appears, you can look at any of the pending messages and select to deliver the message to the group, deliver and whitelist or always allow the sender to post, report the message as spam/junk or delete the pending message. Messages will be deleted after they have been held in moderation for a while, so you may not see some older messages that were not delivered.

If you find that a high percentage of the pending messages are legitimate messages and you don’t want to wait for the weekly pending message summary or have to remember to go check the pending messages manually, it’s possible for the group owner to disable the spam control. This will allow all messages through and rely on your inbox to filter out spam. To make this change:

• When looking at your group, click Manage on the top right.
• Click Settings
• Then Click Moderation
• In the Spam messages section, select the desired option in the dropdown, likely Skip the moderation queue and post to the group.

You should no longer find that legitimate messages are held in the pending message queue. In the event that you later find too much spam is getting through, you can change the setting back to Send them to the moderation queue and send notification to moderators.

Finally, it’s worth noting that messages could also be filtered through another service before reaching your group or go through further filtering before being delivered to your inbox. If you’re still having trouble with missing messages, please reach out us or your managed IT company.