Gijs Verheijke

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Use Google Groups to get unlimited free email addresses for your startup

30 June 2023

Google Suite is my preferred email and productivity suite. But it's not cheap. As a startup, you'll want to create shareable 'email addresses' like admin@yourcompany, support@yourcompany, etc. You can use Google Groups to do this for free. You'll be able to both receive on and sent from an unlimited number of email addresses. And when you hire your first employees, they'll be able to easily access and start using those email addresses too. Here's how:

1. Create a google group with the address you want to use, let's take support@yourcompany.com as an example
2. Add any team mates who need access to the group as members
3. When you get to the settings page, use these settings:
   1. Who can join: invite only
   2. Who can post: Anyone on the internet
   3. Who can read: Everyone in your organization
   4. Switch off all content moderation features. You'll want to see every email, especially at first
4. Go to gmail, settings, 'see all settings'
5. Go to 'Accounts'
6. Under "Send mail as:" Click: "Add another email address"
7. UNTICK (switch off): "Use an an alias"
8. Input the email address of the group and click next
9. If everything is going right, it will ask you for a verification code
10. Go to your inbox, or go to the group's inbox (either will work), get the verification code, input it in the prompt and confirm
11. Back in settings, under "When replying to a message:" select the option: "Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

You're done! What will happen now:

• If anyone emails support@yourcompany.com, you will receive this email in your inbox (no need to navigate to the group). Pro-tip: Set up a filter to collect these in a separate part of your inbox
• If you reply any of those messages, the email will appear to come from support@yourcompany.com
• You will also be able to initiate emails from the new address or use a mailmerge tool to send emails in bulk to your users

Some suggested use-cases:

1. Support address
2. marketing@yourcompany.com and use this to create your social accounts (no hand-over issues)
3. jobs@yourcompany.com and use this to post jobs (collaborate on jobs, no hand-over issues)
4. finance@yourcompany.com collect all invoices for easy filtering. Bonus: when you email your debtors to chase for payment your email will look more official coming from the "head of finance"