Turn Gmail on or off for users

If you have Drive Enterprise edition, upgrade to G Suite Enterprise to get this service.

These instructions are for turning Gmail on or off for some users. Read more about completely removing the Gmail service from your Admin console.

As a G Suite administrator, you can control who uses Gmail in your organization. Just turn Gmail on or off for those people in your Google Admin console. People who have Gmail turned on can see the service in their account. If you've also set up mail flow for your domain, they can use Gmail to send mail with your organization's address.

Before you begin

To stop using your G Suite domain's business address with Gmail, redirect mail flow to the email service you do want to use. If your domain's MX records are pointing to Google servers, update the records to instead point to the server that should get your mail.

Notes:

  • Google Calendar—If Gmail is turned off, calendar invitations emailed from users outside the G Suite domain, or other services such as Exchange, Yahoo, and so on, won't automatically show up in Calendar. Invitations from users in the same G Suite domain should continue to work.
  • If you turn off the Gmail service while your MX records are still directing mail flow to Google servers, the messages will still be delivered. 

To control who uses Gmail in your organization

Before you begin: To turn the service on or off for a set of users, put their accounts in an organizational unit.

  1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

    Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

  2. From the Admin console Home page, go to Appsand thenG Suiteand thenGmail.

  3. At the top right of the gray box, click Edit Service Compose.

  4. To apply settings to individual organizational units, do the following: 

    • At the left, select the organizational unit that contains the users whose settings you want to change.
    • To change the setting, select On or Off.
    • To keep the setting the same, even if the parent setting changes, click Override.
    • If the organization's status is already Overridden, choose an option:
      Inherit—Reverts to the same setting as its parent.
      Save—Saves your new setting (even if the parent setting changes).

    Learn more about the organizational structure.

Changes typically take effect in minutes, but can take up to 24 hours. For details, see Admin console settings don't update.  

If you manage a large number of users or sync your LDAP directory

You can use access groups to turn on a service for specific users within an organizational unit. You turn off the service for the organization, and then add the users to an access group that has the service turned on. This lets you give users access to services without making changes to your organizational structure. Learn about access groups.

You're not done with Gmail setup yet

Turning on the Gmail service doesn't make mail start flowing to people's Gmail accounts. You must first give everyone a user account, then switch your mail flow to G Suite.

For complete setup steps, see Set up Gmail for your team.

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