Introducing better email lists for Google Apps

We've heard quite a few requests for email list enhancements, so we know our users will be happy to hear that several new administrative features for email lists are available today.

First, administrators can now assign permissions per email list that determine who can send email to that list. The sending of email can be restricted to members of the list, anyone in the domain, anyone in the world, or even a subset of members designated as list owners. This means you can more effectively use lists for internal communications, announcements, external contact aliases, and even cross-organizational collaboration.

Second, lists and list membership are easier to manage in bulk in the control panel. Mailing lists can even contain other mailing lists, which allows you to easily reuse frequently-referenced lists. We've also updated the Provisioning API for Premier and Education Edition administrators, which replicates all the email list functionality in the control panel, enabling automated mailing list management. We already have individual customers managing upwards of ten thousand lists using this API.

Third, we've renamed "email lists" to "groups". You can access the feature from your control panel under 'Users and Groups' > 'Groups'. Why would we bother renaming it? We see more uses for groups than just sending email to lists. So, we'll be making groups useful for other enterprise tasks in the future, like easily sharing a document with a group of people. Also, we'll be incorporating many of the features that our consumer users love in Google Groups into Google Apps over time.

All of your existing Google Apps email lists have been converted to groups, so check out our getting started guide and get more out of those lists today!

Posted by Justin Sadowski, Google Apps Engineer