Apps Documentation & Support
The Receiving routing setting is one of multiple options on the Email settings page for managing mail routing and delivery. Receiving routing enables you to set up inbound and internal-receiving delivery options, such as dual delivery and split delivery.
Similar to other email security settings, the Receiving routing setting enables you set up policies that vary by organizational unit. Users within child organizational units inherit the settings you create for the parent organization. You also have the option to add multiple Receiving routing settings to each organizational unit.
Use cases for Receiving routing:
- Route inbound mail to both Gmail and an external server (dual delivery) - With dual delivery, users receive their mail in two inboxes. For example, they can receive mail in both their legacy Microsoft Exchange inbox and their Google Apps inbox. Incoming mail is delivered to Gmail (the primary delivery), and a copy is also forwarded to Exchange (the secondary delivery).
- Route inbound mail based on organizational unit (split delivery) - Use the Receiving routing setting to set up split delivery so that mail is routed to different mail hosts depending on the recipient's organizational unit. For example, you can set up one organizational unit to route inbound mail to the Microsoft Exchange mail host. For another organizational unit, you can use the default routing configuration (direct delivery) so that inbound mail is delivered directly to Gmail.
To configure Receiving routing settings for your domain or organizational unit:
- Sign in to the Google Admin console.
- Do one of the following:
- In the classic Admin console, click Settings > Gmail.
- In the new Admin console, click Google Apps > Gmail > Advanced settings.
Where is it? Which Admin console do I have?
- In the Organizations section near the top of the page, highlight your domain or the organizational unit for which you want to configure settings (see Configure email settings for an organizational unit for more details).
- Scroll down to the Receiving routing section:
- If the setting's status is Not configured yet, click the Configure button near the right edge of the window (the Add setting dialog box opens).
- If the setting's status is Locally applied or Inherited, click Edit to edit an existing setting (the Edit setting dialog box appears), or click Add another to add a new setting (the Add setting dialog box appears).
- When you are finished making changes, click Add setting or Save to close the dialog box.
Note: Any settings you add will be highlighted on the Email settings page.
- Click Save changes at the bottom of the Email settings page.
In the Receiving routing window, click Add a description if you want to enter a unique name for this setting. See the sections below for additional instructions and guidelines.
Email messages to affect
This enables you to set the policy for inbound and/or internal mail. By default, both of the following check boxes are selected. However, if (for example) you want to limit this setting to Inbound mail, you can clear the Internal - receiving check box.
- Inbound: Messages received by your users from senders outside the set of domains associated with your company or organization
- Internal - receiving: Messages received by your users from senders within the set of domains associated with your company or organization
For the above types of messages, do the following
For the Receiving routing setting, you have two options in the drop-down menu: Reject message or Modify message.
Reject message
If you choose this option,
inbound or internal-receiving messages are rejected if the intended recipient is a user in this organizational unit. You have the option to enter customized text for the rejection notice.
Modify message
This option enables you to modify inbound or internal-receiving messages by adding headers, changing the route, changing the envelope recipient, adding more recipients (additional, or secondary routes), and/or removing attachments.
With the Modify message option, you can change the primary delivery, and you can define additional or secondary deliveries that you can use for dual delivery or multiple delivery. See the following descriptions for more details about these controls.
Add X-Gm-Original-To headerBy clicking this check box, a header tag is added in case the recipient is changed so that the downstream server can know the original envelope recipient -- for example, X-Gm-Original-To: jjsmith@solarmora.com.
Adding the X-Gm-Original-To header is useful if you are rerouting a copy of the message to another recipient. In this case, you are changing the recipient address, but the new recipient wants to know the address of the original envelope recipient. They can see the original envelope recipient by checking the X-Gm-Original-To header in the message.
Messages that are routed through Gmail are automatically filtered for spam. By clicking the Add X-Gm-Spam header check box, you also add a special header tag to indicate the spam status of the message:
- The number 0 in the header indicates a message is not spam: X-Gm-Spam: 0
- The number 1 indicates that a message is spam: X-Gm-Spam: 1
By choosing this option, an administrator at a downstream server can set up rules that will handle spam in a different manner than clean mail.
You can add one or more custom headers to messages that are affected by a Receiving routing, Sending routing, or other setting. For example, you can add a header that matches the description that you entered for the setting. This can be helpful for analyzing why a message was routed in a certain way, or why a filter was triggered.
You can enter a string to prepend to the subject of messages. For example, if you enter the word Confidential in this field, message recipients might see the following subject: [Confidential] Monthly report
This option enables you to change the destination of the message. By default, the Gmail mail server is the primary delivery. However, you can change the delivery -- for example, by routing mail to an on-premise mail server such as Microsoft Exchange.
Before you can change the primary delivery, you must first add mail routes with the Hosts tab. The routes that you add on the Host tab are then visible in the Select a route drop-down list.
To change the envelope recipient, click the radio button next to the Replace recipient field, and enter the user's email address -- for example, jjsmith@solarmora.com.
Changing the envelope recipient for a message on the primary delivery is equivalent to forwarding a message to a different recipient. You can also change the envelope recipient on the additional (secondary) delivery, which is equivalent to a "bcc".
Select the Add more recipients check box to set up additional (or secondary) deliveries for dual delivery or multiple delivery.
Choose Basic from the drop-down list to add individual email addresses, and then click Save. You can add multiple recipient addresses by clicking the Add button.
Choose Advanced from the drop-down list to choose advanced options for your secondary delivery. Similar to the settings that you modified for the primary delivery, you can change the envelope recipient, add headers, prepend a custom subject, and remove attachments for the secondary deliveries.
Note: Any settings that you configure for the primary delivery will also affect the secondary deliveries. For example, if you change the envelope recipient, prepend a custom subject, and add custom headers to the primary delivery, the same configuration is applied to the secondary deliveries.
Select this option if you want to remove any attachments from messages. Optionally, you can append text to notify recipients that attachments were removed.
For more details and step-by-step instructions about mail routing, including use cases and examples, see Manage mail routing and delivery: Guidelines and best practices.
Options
Execute this setting only if the envelope sender matches
This option is useful if you want to re-route mail for all users in an organizational unit, but only for messages sent from a few different domains. Click the check box, and then enter the list of domains with the following regular expression syntax:
(yahoo.com|gmail.com|hotmail.com|facebook.com)$
This would cause any message from the above domains to adhere to the route modifications that you made.
Execute this setting only if the envelope recipient matches
This option is useful if (for example) you want to re-route mail to your Microsoft Exchange server for just four users in a specific organizational unit. Using the Receiving routing setting for that organizational unit, you can change the primary delivery to your Exchange server. You can then ensure that this re-route applies only to these four users by entering the list of users with the following regular expression syntax:
^(user1@solarmora.com|user2@solarmora.com|user3@solarmora.com|user4@solarmora.com)$
For more information, see Guidelines for using regular expressions.
