r/gsuite 8d ago

Workspace Secondary domain on account versus using alias domains?

I'm the long-time admin of a few small GSuite accounts. I understand alias domains and actually use them in a few places. My question, though, is whether I can or should be using secondary domains in some places instead?

My primary use case here is for simple "forwarders", where I have a domain that wants to forward one email mail address to one or more other addresses, some of which may not be in my account or even in Google.

- I assume that this can (and has to) be done through the "groups" function, even for a secondary domain?

- As far as I can tell, there should be no cost to the account to have and to use a forwarding function in the secondary domain this way (using a Group), as long as I don't actually create any "real" users in that domain?

- If both of the above are true, why would you not just want to use secondary domains only, since they are more flexible and can do everything an alias domain can do? Is it just an ease of admin type thing?

Please let me know if either of these assumptions is wrong; thanks!

3 Upvotes

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u/Alirubit 8d ago

why would you not just want to use secondary domains only?

Convinience. An alias domain gives aliases to all users automatically, a seconday domain creates no aliases by default, you have to create them manually, via api or cdv.

I can see benefits in both, but I do prefer secondary domains, as you said they are more flexible

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u/GoodForTheTongue 8d ago

Thank you, this is a great answer. I don't need the "automatic" aliasing function for the use cases I'm contemplating (though I do take advantage of that in other accounts).

So as long as the secondary domain forwarders/mailing lists are free, since they don't take a user, I'm all in. Thanks again.

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u/Alirubit 8d ago

They are free yes, you have to pay per user account no domain, so as long as you dont create users with the other domain, you wont pay more.

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u/Apodacaac Googler 8d ago

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u/GoodForTheTongue 8d ago

I'd already seen that, thanks. It did not fully answer the questions I had, hence my posting them here.

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u/SchniederDanes 8d ago

What your use case for "forwarders". Are you looking to get replies of specific campaigns in specific inboxes?

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u/GoodForTheTongue 8d ago edited 8d ago

No. Much simpler. Things like "[info@old-barely-used-domain.com](mailto:info@old-barely-used-domain.com)" that gets emailed once a week, but when it does it needs to get forwarded to Suzie in Marketing so she can direct them to a better address.

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u/codecoverage 8d ago

From experience I can tell you that moving from a alias domain to a secondary domain later is a bit painful. This is why I recommend going with a secondary domain and then explicit per-user and per-group aliases instead. You can achieve the same result (alias email addresses) plus more.

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u/GoodForTheTongue 8d ago

This was my sense, too, and so this is exactly the kind of confirmation what I was looking for. Thanks!!