Transcript

Brandon Carter:

Today we are gonna do a deep dive on email management, so all the things that you can do to manage and report on your user's emails in Google Workspace via gPanel.

My name is Brandon. I am the marketing director at Promevo, the one who rambles too long on these webinar intros and outros.

The one that you're really here for is Shelbi. She's one of our support engineers and probably someone that a lot of you who are gPanel users already have interacted with either in live chat or on your support tickets. So, good morning, Shelbi.

Shelbi Gaines:

Hi, Brandon. Good morning. Happy Tuesday.

Brandon Carter:

Happy Tuesday. And we appreciate Shelbi taking the time to do all of these, um, you know, and share her knowledge and help educate our user base.

Who is we? We is Promevo. We are the makers of gPanel, but we do a whole bunch more than that.

We are a premier Google Cloud partner, which means we can help you manage not just your Google Workspace and gPanel, but your Google Cloud, your GCP environment, your Chrome devices. Obviously, Gemini is a big thing, being part of Google Workspace now. We can help you workshops that through like workshops and like interactive enablement things that we do. Uh, you want to build with Gemini like Vertex AI? We help you do all of those things. And obviously we have, uh, a handful of partners as well. So everything that you would ever want to need with Google Cloud, you come to Promevo and we help you with it.

So before we dive into this, I do want to make a quick pitch for gPanel Basics. So today we are doing a deep dive, like a full hour, on email management. Shelbi's going to cover a ton of stuff. If you're looking for something, maybe a little bit broader or something that like, Hey, help me understand the basics of this thing. Like, forget going to deep dive on email. Like I need to know how to like manage my users.

We do a monthly session that we call gPanel Basics. Second Tuesday of every month. It's half an hour. It's usually Shelbi and she's going to like, she goes through a 20 minute quick, like bang, bang, bang. These are the most important functions that you need to know.

Reporting, user management, calendar management, which is a big topic. Uh, every month. You can, there's no limit to them. You can show up anytime. We're slowly evolving how we do it, understanding how all of you use gPanel. Um, but you can sign up for that by going to promevo.com/webinars.

Some of you here, I know, are not gPanel users. We're glad you're here. We want to introduce gPanel to you.

gPanel is basically like a total control platform that sits over your Google Workspace environment. So, you know, you have Google Workspace and it gives you the Admin console. But imagine adding a layer of power, of automation, of omniscience is a word that I use a lot to describe the abilities, that you get with gPanel.

So if you're constantly onboarding, offboarding, you can automate those things. You can create a rules engine that lets you set up hey, I want to be notified in chat anytime a user takes a particular action, um, you know, mass transfers of, sorry, delegation of assets, reports on what's happening in Drive.

If you're not it the gPanel user, glad you're here. I think this will be really informative for you. But really go to promevo.com/gpanel and start your trial. Request a demo with our team. And of course, once you get in there and you start messing around with it, down in the bottom right corner is a little chat bar, uh, where you can often connect directly with Shelbi, uh, or someone on her team.

I'm going to kick it over to Shelbi, who is going to walk you through just about everything that you need to know about managing email within gPanel.

Shelbi Gaines:

Thank you, Brandon. And again, welcome to today's webinar on gPanel's deep dive on email management capabilities. Um, in today's digital landscape, email remains a cornerstone of business communication. Effectively managing your email is essential for productivity, security and compliance.

Like Brandon mentioned, gPanel provides a suite of powerful tools that extend beyond the basic functionality of the Google Admin console, giving administrators greater control and flexibility over their organization's email environment.

In this webinar today, we will take a deep dive into gPanel's email management features, highlighting their benefits and some use cases. We will also explore other email related functionalities that gPanel offers, showcasing how they can streamline administrative tasks and enhanced email security. By the end of this webinar, hopefully you will leave with a solid understanding of gPanel's email management capabilities and how to leverage them to optimize your organization's email environment.

So let's go ahead and get started. And we're going to start off here on the user profile page, just so I can show you where your Gmail settings will be found. They will always be found at the top toolbar in a user's profile.

When you click on those, you will see all of these options. The first option that we have is going to be account delegation. Account delegation empowers administrators to grant specific privileges to other users' inbox. This feature is particularly useful in scenarios where individuals need to act on behalf of each other.

gPanel's account delegation also includes an expiration date feature, eliminating the need for manual account updates. As an administrator, you may need to delegate access to a user's email account for various legitimate reasons.

When an employee is on vacation, sick leave, or even an extended leave, delegating their email account ensures that important emails are not missed and left attended. A colleague or assistant can access the account to respond to urgent messages, handle time sensitive requests, and keep projects moving forward.

In situations where multiple users need access to a shared mailbox or a team account, delegating email access allows them to collaborate effectively. Team members can respond to customer inquiries, manage project communications, and share files without the need for multiple logins or forwarding emails.

If an employee is experiencing technical issues with their email account, such as connectivity problems or synchronization errors, an administrator may need to temporarily access that account to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. This ensures a prompt resolution and minimizes disruption to the employee's work.

In cases of legal or compliance audits, administrators may need to delegate access to email accounts to authorize personnel for review and analysis.

In the event of an emergency or unforeseen circumstance, delegating email access can ensure continuity of communication and response. A designated individual can monitor the account, relay critical information, and coordinate with relevant parties.

Administrators can also create Gmail filters for users to manage various aspects of their email accounts. As an administrator, you may need to create filters in a user's Gmail account for various reasons.

Filters can be set up to automatically block or quarantine suspicious emails, protecting the user from potential security threats and reducing the risk of phishing attacks. Filters can be configured to identify and manage sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers.

Filters can be used to automatically archive or retain specific type of email, excuse me, to meet regulatory requirements, such as those related to financial transactions or health care records.

Filters can be used to set up, uh, to categorize and label emails, streamlining your inbox organization and making it easier for your users to find and manage their messages.

Filters could also be used, uh, to trigger automated actions, such as forwarding emails to specific individuals or creating tasks in project management systems. This can help improve productivity.

And of course, filters are always good for out of office management. Filters can be configured to handle incoming emails for users who are out office and replying with a custom message or forwarding those emails to a colleague.

The send as feature allows users to send emails from different addresses. This is beneficial for email clients who manage multiple email accounts or have aliases. It allows them to send emails that appear to originate from a different address than the one they are currently logged into.

This functionality has several use cases for administrators. A scenario that I could think of is perhaps a company's marketing team is managing multiple social media accounts, each with its own dedicated email address. To maintain a consistent brand identity and ensure that all social media related emails appear to come from the official account, the marketing team requires the ability to send emails using the social media email address.

The problem is that you have individual team members that have their own Gmail accounts, and they need to be able to send emails on behalf of the social media account without logging in and out of the account multiple times throughout the day.

One solution could be for administrators to come in and set up a send as, allowing them to send emails from the social media account's email address. This would eliminate the need for team members to switch accounts and ensure that all social media related emails appear to come from the official source.

Some benefits for administrators being able to create a send as, or that you can streamline your workflow. Team members can send emails from the social media account without logging out of their personal Gmail account accounts, as, as I've stated.

You can get that consistency in branding. All of your social media related emails will appear to come from the social media account's email address. The administrator can centrally manage send as permissions for all team members, ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to send emails on behalf of that social media account.

And by sending emails from the social media account's email address, team members can foster a stronger connection with followers and build trust as recipients will recognize the official source of the communication.

The next section we're going to cover are going to be labels, or I still refer to these as folders.

Administrators can create Gmail labels for users. These labels can be used to, uh, for organization, project management. Labels like action required can be used to highlight important emails helping users prioritize their tasks and stay productive.

Labels can be used to categorize emails for compliance and legal purposes. Labels can be used to apply retention policies to emails, ensuring that important messages are not accidentally deleted.

Labels can be used to facilitate teamwork and track the status of emails in a shared mailbox. Labels also make it a little easier for users to filter and search for emails with specific criteria, saving time and effort.

And labels can also be used to guide new users on email organization and company policies, helping them to get up to speed quickly. And here are just a few labels that I made. You also have the option, administrators will have the option to adjust the label visibility and the message visibility as well.

The next two settings we're going to look at are going to be your POP settings and your IMAP settings. gPanel provides administrators with the ability to oversee and configure both of these email settings for the user.

IMAP is normally the most preferred protocol just because it allows for synchronization of email across multiple devices. Um, and as an admin, you may need to access a user's IMAP settings in Gmail. And there could be various legitimate reasons that you may need to do this.

For instance, um, one thing that comes to mind is troubleshooting. Users might report problems syncing their Gmail with third party email clients. You may need to verify or adjust IMAP settings to resolve connection or sync errors. And if a user is experiencing issues sending or receiving emails through their client, checking IMAP settings is a crucial step. Adjusting the IMAP settings may be helpful for a migration or a setup.

During onboarding or when migrating users to a new email client, you may need to configure IMAP settings for them. Perhaps if your company is switching to or from another email platform, you need to access your IMAP settings just to ensure a smooth transition.

And, IMAP settings are also helpful for administrator with, uh, if you have a user that is having password and authentication issues, if users are having trouble authenticating with their email clients, checking their IMAP settings and other security related settings can help pinpoint the problem.

And lastly, if a user is locked out of their account and they have a third party client reconnected, you also can come in and just check your IMAP settings as well.

There may be certain circumstances when administrators need to access the POP settings. For instance, POP may be better for users that have limited storage space on their email server or their device. Uh, POP basically allows you to download and store the emails locally on their device.

So again, this may be helpful for those users that have limited storage, or if you have limited storage on your email server, using POP is a good idea. Or if you need um, situations where perhaps the user is offline. Administrators can come in, adjust your POP settings, and set those so that those, uh, users can go in and download emails for the device for offline viewing. And again, both of those settings will be found here in the user profile.

The next tool is going to be our Vacation Responder. Administrators have the capability to configure automatic vacation responding messages for users who are out of the office. This functionality ensures that anyone attempting to connect, contact the absent employee via email receives a timely notification about their unavailability and includes information about when they're expected to return or who to contact in their absence.

This feature not only helps to streamline communication, but also prevents misunderstandings or delays. Um, it also just improves that client communication because your clients, if they're used to you guys always responding back, having a vacation responder just ensures that there's always that constant communication, which is really important for clients.

Forwarding is another, uh, option that administrators are going to be able to set up along with the forwarding addresses. When an employee leaves the organization, their emails can be automatically forwarded to the manager or a designated colleague to ensure continuity and prevent loss of important information.

Another reason an admin may need to enable forwarding is account consolidation, account consolidation, excuse me. In cases where multiple email accounts are being merged or consolidated, Forwarding can be set to redirect emails from the old accounts to the new one, ensuring that no messages are missed during the transition.

Another use case for setting up forwarding could be, again, delegation or a temporary absence. If an employee is temporarily gone for a few weeks, you have all of your emails forwarded and that way you can ensuring that urgent emails are still addressed in a timely manner.

And for some organization, it might be beneficial to centralize the management or for certain type of emails by just forwarding them to like a specific department or a group. For instance, maybe HR, if you have a sales team. It might just be easier to set up forwarding. So all those emails automatically routed to them as well.

The last tool that we're going to look at available within the user profile tool are going to be our signature template. With gPanel, administrators can effortlessly design and implement standardized signature templates, ensuring that every outgoing email adheres to a company branding guidelines. This centralized control not only saves time, but also eliminates the potential for errors and consistencies that could arise from manual signature creation.

You could also change the signature within the user profile. So for instance, I have this current template set, but maybe if I need another template that displays some different information, I can also come down and choose from all of the templates that I have created.

So if I needed to change a template to maybe post some different information, or maybe it's a different company, I can also do that to within the user profile and that will show up as well.

We do have quite a few videos on signature templates. Um, there's so much we can do with the signature templates, but again, if you guys have any questions on creating a signature templates or how to roll those out, or just would like to see more in depth, we can always, um, do a support call or just do that after this. So these are our signature templates.

Okay, next we are going to talk about our gPanel export tool. It's going to be found. As your second option, and the gPanel export tool basically exports a copy of the user's inbox. gPanel facilitates data management and migration through this export tool.

Using this expert tool is helpful because it can create backups to avoid accidental deletion. Again, it's helpful during migrations. And maybe compliance or legal situations. In some cases, you may need to export your Gmail data for compliance or legal purposes. Using this export tool can help you in a lot of ways, and we can briefly go over how you would set that up.

When you are using the Gmail export tool, the first thing you will need to do is to create a public key and a private key. And if you look into some of the documentation, you will see a link where it will take you to this website where you can create that.

Once you have created that, you are able to start creating your actual Gmail export within gPanel. When you go to create it, you'll need to provide a user that you want to export.

You can also customize the date range, so in this case I used last week, but if you needed to go maybe two weeks back, you can customize, you can customize that. And you can also choose to, whether if you want to include deleted messages, full message, or headers only.

And so, once you have created that Gmail export, and before it runs, it's going to look like the top row, and you should see export pending. It'll probably take a few minutes for it to pull, depending on how big the user's inbox is. If you have a lot of emails, it may take a few minutes, but normally, it'll, uh, the export should be ready within, like, two to three minutes.

And then when you are ready to actually export that, you will, you will see on the second, um, the second image where the arrows pointing to the actions, you will see like a little prompt and you'll hit that prompt and it'll, uh, prompt you to download that export. And what will happen is you'll use the private key that you created earlier to decrypt your message.

Again, these messages gonna be encrypted, so that's why you need the public and private key. But once you have decrypted it, then you have a copy of the user's inbox and there's not an amount like you can run these all the time. So again, this is really good in compliance situations, archiving situations.

If you have long term data retention policies, you can export the emails. And you can also, uh, when you are exporting these, you can there are various data formats that you can export. So it is also very user friendly.

The next tool we're going to go to is going to be our Gmail deletion tool. It is a powerful administrative feature that provides granular control over email content within a user's mailbox. It basically enables administrators to search and permanently delete specific emails or groups of emails based on defined criteria.

This targeted deletion capability can be applied to individual users or extended to entire groups of users, ensuring compliance and data retention policies. And this also can help with freeing up storage space. Again, this is something that is not found within the Admin console. This is only exclusive to gPanel.

The tool search functionality allows administrators to specify a wide range of parameters including sender, receipt, recipient, subject, keywords, date range, and even attachment types. Additionally, administrators can narrow down the search scope by specifying particular folders or searching across all mail within the user's mailbox.

This flexibility empowers administrators to precisely locate and remove unwanted or sensitive emails, preventing unauthorized access or accidental disclosure. So to create a, uh, Gmail delete, you, you would also find that here under your import and export tool.

Here on this slide, I have created just a test email. And as you can see at the top, um, it was sent at 12:38. And when I go to create my Gmail deletion report, the first thing it's going to ask me for is going to, where do I want to search? The administrators can click on this dropdown and they can choose from Inbox, Spam, All Mail. You can choose all those parameters.

In this case, I targeted from, um, one of my accounts to my test account. And then I just threw in a subject. You see, for your sources, you will be able to target your sources will be user, you can do group, OUs, and domain. In this case, I'm just doing an individual user, but again, you can pull this if you have an email accidentally sent to a group, you can search group, again, OU, and domain.

Once you have created that, you will see it'll pop up at the top. The newest Gmail deletion report pop at the top and you can have two options. If you need to double check to make sure that the source is correct or you want to make sure that the message maybe you need to change something. You can always hit the little play button and you'll be provided with a, basically a Google sheet and it'll just kind of give you a quick summary of the information that you have chosen to target.

So in this case, mine was say, I'm targeting Shelbi Gaines's account. Um, we're looking for no subject or see the thing was test subject in the subject field and if that is correct, then the next thing I want to do is I'm going to want to run that little trash button. And that will take us to this run Gmail deletion.

This is like a confirmation page because again, once you delete an email from a user's inbox is not reversible. You can't replace it. So this is just kind of, again, finalizing that. You'll have to type in all mail confirming that that is where you want the information to come from, is all mail.

And then when you hit run, you will again see your Gmail deletion reports. It'll provide you with your thread ID, your message ID when the actual event was run. In this case, it's our deletion tool. And then if you look at the bottom screen, the message is gone.

Again, this is really helpful in those cases where a group, maybe an email that has financial information was disclosed to, um, the sales group, and the sales doesn't need to see that. You can go into here, you can target maybe the sales group OU or if they're in a group, um, in a group by themselves, you can target them and you can delete the email.

And again, that prevents you from having to go in to delegate the account to yourself or having to log into the user, find that email, and remove it itself. And again, this is something that is only found within gPanel.

The next feature we're going to go back to is going to be our report center are going to be our reports that function around emails. And those will be found, all of reports will be found here in report center.

We have so many exclusive reports that are not found within your Admin console related to email.

Some of those exclusive reports are going to include your email delegate, um, report. This is, of course, the report that's tracking when someone grants another user access to their Gmail account. Email forwarding is another unique report.

In addition to all these reports, we also provide some other unique reports to help you understand how Gmail is being used within your organization.

This includes your Gmail usage report. This report is going to give you details on how frequently Gmail is being accessed and include other different metrics.

Your Gmail breakdown report. This report could offer it offers a breakdown of Gmail activity by user, group, and other criteria, showing which departments in the most emails.

And then another good report I always like to mention are going to be your email monitor report.

All of these reports have the ability to be automated, so it's going to allow you to stay on top of those insights. Um, if you need to send those to other people, you can also create a schedule for those and send those out to, um, the parties or users that need to see that as well. So that's going to be our email reports.

The next section we're going to take a look at is going to be our automation menu.

Some of the highlights that I like to point about with the automation are that admin are able to come in and create certain policies that include Gmail settings to assist with onboarding and offboarding processes. For instance, I created a few policies, but these are just some new user policies.

And as you can see, some of the settings that administrators can add are going to be adding a delegate to account, adding send as, Changing the IMAP, uh, changing POP for instance, maybe creating a Gmail filter. And these policies can be incredibly useful for streamlining, onboarding, and offboarding processes.

So if you come in and set in a policy, you have a new user set up, this actually eliminates the need for the administrator to go in and do this manually. You can set these up.

The same can be said for decommissioning. There are several policies, or several actions that one can take related to email. For instance, if you are, uh, decomming a user and you need to remove their email alias or remove a forwarding address, you can do that.

You can also add a delegate. This will be helpful when you know that a user is going to be leaving on Friday, you know that the manager needs to have access to this account. You can add a delegate.

You can also set forwarding and you can also create a Gmail export, which could be helpful. Again, if you have a user that's leaving and you need that information for archival purposes for retention policies, you can set that up as well.

So some key takeaways from today are going to be that gPanel extends the capabilities of the Google Admin console, providing enhanced email management features.

gPanel simplifies user management and allows for granular control over email settings for administrators.

gPanel's email export and deletion tools facilitate data management and compliance.

gPanel's exclusive email reports provide valuable insights into email activity and usage and gPanel's automation features streamline administrative tasks and improve efficiency.

Brandon Carter:

The Google admin console has some good email management tools. I think where gPanel really, um, excels is being able to like, well, for example, some of the automations like you mentioned, if you know, someone is departing the company, uh, let's say like next Friday using gPanel, you can go in and create kind of a sequence of events like, all right, at this point, we're going to delegate their email.

 Um, you know, maybe we want to do, uh, like we can revoke any Drive permissions or any shared files that they might have, like you can, you can take all of those policies, uh, and bundle those together and have them, you know, as part of a countdown. You can get alerted whenever someone that's departing your organization, uh, maybe share something out.

Um, you know, on top of just being able to, uh, identify when your, um, "CEO" is sending out an email to everyone in the organization from a very strange email address asking people to go and pick up gift cards. The CEO is probably not looking for gift cards.

So to be able to go in and identify that email and pull it out of everyone's inboxes because you know, we're all we're all smart, intelligent people, but we still fall for stuff. It happens, right? There's no shame in it Um, I do want to say since like it doesn't look like uh, we're going to get many questions here in the live webinar there's an email on your screen, updates@promevo.com. Uh, anything that you want to see addressed, any questions that you have related to this webinar, if you want Shelbi and the support team to chime in, how to do something, cause we get it sometimes it's, you know, it's hard to drop a question in a live webinar and have it answered in front of everybody.

Um, do that, send an email to updates@promevo.com. They go directly to me and I'll make sure that, uh, that you get the response that you're looking for.

Um, I do want to say we have a ton of content coming out around gPanel. Some big announcements coming here in the next month or two around features as well as how you interact with gPanel. Uh, we're going to give it, we're giving it more resources. And giving you more resources as to, you know, educational materials, uh, channels in which you can ask questions. So keep an eye out for all of that.

We do have a newsletter. If you go to primevo. com slash gPanel dash newsletter, Uh, you can get alerted in your inbox whenever a new feature launches.

Uh, if you go to promevo.com/officehours, you can sign up for all of these. I do want to say a month from today, we are doing another deep dive on Google Drive management. Huge topic, uh, even bigger than email. I don't know how we're going to knock all of it out in an hour because Drive is like...

Shelbi Gaines:

A lot.

Brandon Carter:

...Fury Road. You can, there's all sorts of stuff that goes on in there. But you can wrangle it all with gPanel. Uh, and we're going to dive into that one month from today.

Um, but March 11th, we've got gPanel basics. Those are the like, again, 20 to 25 minute, like quick hitters. Uh, Shelbi will walk you through the most essential functions that you need to know.

And it's a good forum to ask questions. Like, uh, generally those tend to get a lot more people interacting, um, and asking about things.

And then April 15th, uh, coming up at the beginning of April is Google Cloud Next. It's Google Cloud's big, uh, conference where they announce all sorts of new stuff. They announce changes. You get a lot of partners like Promevo that are announcing things. Expect it to be all about AI, Gemini, Vertex, all those things.

We are going to have a webinar. You don't have to go to Google Cloud Next. We're going to Google Cloud Next. We'll see you there. If you're there, look us up. Um, but if you can't make it, join our webinar on April 15th.

We're going to walk you through everything that you need to know, uh, and, you know, make sure that you're on top of all the latest news and announcements that come out of that conference.

Uh, that being said. I think we're done, Shelbi.

Shelbi Gaines:

Okay, sounds good.

Brandon Carter:

We're gonna give everyone about 20 minutes back. So final reminder, if you haven't tried gPanel yet, we can hook you up with a demo and a free trial.

Go to promevo.com/gpanel. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, until we see you then. Thank you, Shelbi.

Shelbi Gaines:

Anytime, of course.

Brandon Carter:

And thank you to all of our viewers out there. Uh, we look forward to seeing you again and happy Tuesday.