Looking for help blocking students emailing year groups in Gmail

[robjduk]

Hello all,

As the title says, my students like to email entire groups and its getting tiresome. I setup what I thought was the block with content compliance within Gmail but its not working and wonder if someone could take a look please and tell me where I'm going wrong. Just want students to not be able to email year7@.... for example.

 

 

 

Thank you all

[paulkerton]

So my first question is....

Who needs to be able to email the year group groups?

[robjduk]

staff only

[jthompson]

You have no criteria in section 2, so no messages will ever match the rule.

 

Ours looks like this (our student email groups all have a students. prefix).

 

 

Your section 1 is probably okay (I just ticked them all). That rule is created at the root OU but is disabled at the staff OU, so that they can then send to the groups.

 

It can be done as a routing rule instead, I just haven't got around to doing that. Note that if a student addresses an email to individuals and a mailing group, this rule will prevent delivery to any of those other recipients as well.

Edited February 26, 2020 by jthompson

[b055man]

You can configure the google groups so students cannot post to them by denying "posting" rights or setting moderation rules.

[paulkerton]

I don't think you need to make it overly complicated with the rules, as far as I'm aware.

I would make your "all-staff" group a Manager of the "year-group" Group. Then I would configure the access type so that only "Group Owners" and "Group Managers" can publish posts (aka email the email address) but Group Members and the Entire Organisation can't.

I believe that would work, though I'm happy for people to correct me!

[jthompson]

I don't think you need to make it overly complicated with the rules, as far as I'm aware.

I would make your "all-staff" group a Manager of the "year-group" Group. Then I would configure the access type so that only "Group Owners" and "Group Managers" can publish posts (aka email the email address) but Group Members and the Entire Organisation can't.

I believe that would work, though I'm happy for people to correct me!

 

A possible issue with that is that all of your staff are then members of groups that they don't need to be in, and thereby receiving all of those messages.

 

Content compliance or routing rules also allow you to prevent students emailing staff groups, but allow staff to email staff groups that they aren't in (e.g. SLT).

[flyinghaggis]

You can configure the google groups so students cannot post to them by denying "posting" rights or setting moderation rules.

 

We looked into this but the Google Group options don't seem to allow you to block a specific group from being able to send to another?

 

Another option you could try is adding the member of staff in charge of each year group to the list. This stopped our pupils abusing the lists very quickly as they know what they're sending also goes to the SLT member responsible for their year group!

[b055man]

We simply set the staff group rights to post to the group but not receive emails.

[jthompson]

A rule seems like a simpler setup to me, since your groups and your associated GCDS config can then be simpler.

[paulkerton]

We looked into this but the Google Group options don't seem to allow you to block a specific group from being able to send to another?

Another option you could try is adding the member of staff in charge of each year group to the list. This stopped our pupils abusing the lists very quickly as they know what they're sending also goes to the SLT member responsible for their year group!

 

Fair point, and that's also a very good idea. The SLT member would soon stamp down on it!

[jthompson]

Hello all,

As the title says, my students like to email entire groups and its getting tiresome.

 

You might find this helpful. Some years ago, we had a student go to the trouble of adding every other student as recipients of a message, then sat back and waited for the reply-all chaos to ensue, which it did. Since then, I've always had a rule in place that prevents students sending messages that have more than 30 other school recipients. It's kinda the next step on after preventing students from sending to the student groups.

 

Advanced content match

Location: Recipients header

Match type: Matches regex

Regexp: schoolname\.org

Minimum count match: 31 (or whatever limit you want)

 

You then set it to reject anything that matches.