This is a question that I come across more and more every week and it’s something that you can be very strategic with when you’re setting up your Google Workspace account.
Most often, businesses are moving over to the cloud with Google Workspace from having their emails hosted on the web hosting for a period of time and sometimes have multiple email addresses set up and then hit the roadblock of thinking they need to set up individual user accounts for each of the email addresses they have previously had which can add up if you have 5+ different email addresses in your business. Because Google Workspace, you pay a monthly subscription per user. But – there is a way to avoid this if you need to – but you need to take a good look at how you operate in your inboxes.
What is a User?
I’ve borrowed this definition directly from Google support – A user is defined as one personalized email address (name@yourcompany). For your business – think about who you actually need to be logging in to your Google Workspace account (or Organisation). If it is just you, then you will set up one user account. If you have a small team, then you set up user accounts for each member of your team attached to their own dedicated email addresses. Think of each User as having a seat at your business table within Google Workspace.
What is an Alias?
An alias is an alternative email address (email alias) for a user so they can send and receive emails with another email address. They are able to be added to a user’s primary email address within their Google Workspace user account (therefore is only available within paid Google Workspace accounts).
So think Wade Wilson having his main login user and having Deadpool as an alias on his email account – you know personal and business under one account. 😉
What can I set up within Google Workspace with Users and Aliases?
So this is where I super nerdy on you and give you some scenarios that I have either used personally or set up for clients. Because not only do we want to get bang for our buck in our business but we also want to work strategically so that we don’t restrict growth down the line if you’re working towards having a business bigger than you.
There’s no one setup that fits all, so here’s a number of common scenarios that are possible with setting up your Google Workspace Users to ensure it works in a way that works for you (and your bank account) for your business.
Scenario 1: All-The-Emails-All-The-Inboxes
This is how many think they need to set up Google Workspace after they’ve been sitting in their web hosted webmail service. Every single email address needs it’s very own inbox to be able to receive them. Which when you were on your hosting webmails was an affordable option – but with Google Workspace that means having a User per email address. Which is making your business bank account clench at the prospect….
Cost: 6 x user seats per month = $$$$$$
Scenario 2: Solo Superstar
You’re wearing all of the hats and want all of your email to come into one inbox and is being managed solely by you.
Note that when you set up the user email address – that email address is also included in the emails that will be received under that user account.
Cost: 1 x user seat per month = $
Scenario 3: Looking Ahead
You are solo now but plan to build a team in the future (and want to have the boundaries between customer support emails and your inbox). Create your Users based on roles and place the aliases under where you want them to be so when you bring on help, the separation is ready to go.
Cost: 2 x user seats per month = $$
Scenario 4: Multiple Business Empire
This one is for those of you who are doing the multiple business dance – as I know some have a couple on the go and are building to be able to have say a product based business running while they have a separate service based business at the same time. And you’re not sure what down the line looks like but you’re wanting to keep options open for potential selling off down the track. This is a structure that I’d recommend so that you can keep each business in their own silos so that should you sell one of the businesses off you can easily hand over the digital silo to the new operators with minimal disruption (and keeping sanity intact).
Cost: 4 x user seats per month = $$$$
Scenario 5: Multi-Business Collector
This is an alternative for those of you who are doing the multiple business dance – and have zero intentions of ever selling them off and want to have everything in one ecosystem for yourself. In this case it’s split between CEO and Admin roles because it will likely be a good idea to have some kind of separation between the businesses.
Cost: 3 x user seats per month = $$$
Some important things to keep in mind
- Aliases can’t be used as a login on user accounts – so you can’t sign in with an email alias address and be able to access the additional Google services that are attached to the user account (think Google Drive, Google Calendar etc).
- Any calendar invitations sent to any of your aliases will be allocated to the User account that controls that alias – so you won’t have separate calendars for each of your aliases within Google Calendars.
- There’s a maximum of aliases you’re able to have on each user – which is 30. But let’s be honest, that feels like a lot of aliases to be managing!
- If down the track you decide to make one of your aliases into a user account you won’t be able to migrate the email history of that email address over to that new user account.
- On that note, you can’t have an alias the same name as an existing Google Account in your workspace – or having the same alias on two user accounts isn’t possible for receiving emails – however, you can have them set up as Send As on multiple user accounts.
- All emails will come into one place without any labels on them except if you go into the email and check the to: – this is where Filters and Labels are the magic superpower for differentiating what emails are coming in to each email alias.
Do aliases work for additional domains?
In short, yes. 🙂 Scenarios 4 and 5 give examples on how this can work for additional domain holders (aka domain collectors – don’t worry, guilty over here too).
There’s a few considerations with how you set up the multiple domains which you do need to think about – again, it really is about how you intend on using the domains going forward.
Google Workspace Help gives the answers to some really helpful FAQs that will help you to understand how multiple domains can be set up and work alongside aliases – you can check that out here.
Step-by-step for setting up Aliases within Google Workspace
Like everything Google related – I prefer to share the how-to guides from the horse’s mouth because updates occur more frequently than it is humanly possible to keep up with. Click here to view the guide.
But to give you a very simple step by step – you log in as the Admin on your Google Workspace and follow the following steps:
- Sign in to your Google Admin console – https://admin.google.com
- In the Admin console, go to Menu Directory Users (or Users – Manage)
- To open the user settings page, click on the user’s name.
- Under the users name in the left panel, click Add Alternative Emails.
- This will open up the Alternative emails section in the panel, from here enter the name for the alias you want to create (make sure you only enter the part of the address before the @ sign).
- (If required) Select the domain you want to show at the end of the address – this only applies if you have multiple domains activated in your workspace.
- If you want to add more than one – keep adding further aliases through step 5 and 6.
- Hit Save which will be on the right side of the screen at the bottom of the section panel.
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