This article is for Google Workspace administrators who manage Gmail accounts for a company, school, or other group. To manage your personal Gmail account, go to the Gmail Help Center.
As an administrator, you can control Gmail access for the users in your Google Workspace organization. You can turn Gmail on for everyone. Or, turn it on for certain groups or departments.
Before you begin
If you want to turn on Gmail for some users and not others, you have these options:
- By department—Add users to an organizational unit to control access by department. For details, go to How the organizational structure works.
- Across departments—Add users to an access group to allow access to users across or within departments. For details, go to Use groups to customize service access.
Turn Gmail on or off for users in your organization
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Sign in with an administrator account to the Google Admin console.
If you aren’t using an administrator account, you can’t access the Admin console.
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Go to Menu
Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail.
Requires having the Gmail Settings administrator privilege.
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Click Service status.
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To turn a service on or off for everyone in your organization, click On for everyone or Off for everyone, and then click Save.
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(Optional) To turn a service on or off for an organizational unit:
- At the left, select the organizational unit.
- To change the Service status, select On or Off.
- Choose one:
- If the Service status is set to Inherited and you want to keep the updated setting, even if the parent setting changes, click Override.
- If the Service status is set to Overridden, either click Inherit to revert to the same setting as its parent, or click Save to keep the new setting, even if the parent setting changes.
Learn more about organizational structure.
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(Optional) To turn on a service for a set of users across or within organizational units, select an access group. For details, go to Use groups to customize service access.
If you turn Gmail off for your Google Workspace organization
To stop using your organization’s business address with Gmail:
- Redirect mail flow to the email service that you want to use.
- If your domain's MX records are pointing to Google servers, update the records to point to the server that should get your mail.
If you turn off Gmail while MX records are still directing mail to Google servers, messages aren't delivered to recipients.
Gmail keeps messages in your users' mailboxes until your organization’s Google Workspace account is deleted or the user is deleted. Learn more
How turning off Gmail affects Calendar
- Google Calendar invitations from users outside your organization aren't automatically added to Calendar.
- Invitations from third-party calendar services aren't automatically added.
- Invitations from users in your organization continue to work.
If you turn Gmail back on…
Turning the Gmail service back on doesn't automatically start mail delivery to your users’ Gmail accounts. You likely need to re-do the steps to set up Gmail. For details, go to Activate Gmail with Google Workspace.
