Archive for the ‘Google Apps’ Category

Majority of email being delivered to customer except one or two

Friday, October 10th, 2014

This is a very common issue if you are sending email with multiple invoice or statement attachments.

If you are using IIS 6 Smart Host to relay email:

  • Open Internet Information Services (IIS) 6 Manager
  • Expand the default domain
  • Right click on the [SMTP Virtual Server #1] and select properties
  • Click on the messages tab in increase the following:

Limit message size to (KB): default is 2048 so increase it to 20480

Limit session size to (KB): default is 10340 increase it to at least the size of the Limit message size.

  •  Click OK and resend the email.

If you are sending directly to your SMTP provider check with them to see what the message size limits are because many will set that to 2 MB like Google Applications. The reason for the limit is so the SMTP server does not get bogged down trying to scan the email with spam filter and processing large requests.

Hope this helps.

Creating groups for email lists within Google Applications

Sunday, March 30th, 2014

Creating groups in Google Applications can create a group for documentation collaboration and email. Creating a group for email means that the members will not be visible to the recipients

  • Log into your Google Applications account using an Administrator account.
  • With the new Dashboard find the Groups – “Manage groups of users and mailing lists”
  • Click on the Groups section
  • Click on the shortcut located towards the upper right hand corner of the page to create a new group.
  • On the Create new group page enter the following:
  1. Name of the group – A name to call the group.
  2. Group email address – Email address that the group will use. This cannot be an email address that already exists within the Google Applications domain.
  3. Access Level – I generally keep this at the team level so that users can send email to the group but cannot see the members.
  4. Click Create
  • Once the group is created you will be redirected to the group’s application page.
  • To add users to the group click on Manage users in (name of group)
  • In the Add new members section entry the email addresses you want in the group. The email address does not have to be a member of the domain.
  • Once you have added the members press the Add button.
  • NOTE: At any time you can add all members of the domain to the group. This is very important if you are considering adding an email group for all employees or students if the domain is for a school.
  • Once the users have been added you can exit the group and test within an email client by sending email to the group email address.
  • You can also add other groups to the new group by adding the group email address to the newly created group.
  • Restrict Ability to Send Email to the Group – You can restrict the ability to send email to the group by setting the owner as the only one who can send email. What that does is restrict the ability to “Reply to” and for unauthorized personnel from using the group email address to spam the members of the group.  This can be set up by clicking on the new group – Role and permissionsCustom and removing the check mark from all by the Owner group. Click Save changes

Hope you enjoyed this brief overview of creating groups in Google Application. If you have any questions please let me know and I will be happy to answer them.

YouTube: Add custom thumbnail and do not show relational videos at end

Sunday, September 22nd, 2013

Adding a custom thumbnail to a YouTube video is not hard. Google just wants to ensure the account is not being used by a spammer. So all you need to do to activated the custom thumbnail for your video is allow them to call or text you then you enter the number provided by Google. At that point you will now be able to upload a custom thumbnail.

Side Note: I create thumbnails by playing the video on my PC, pausing it and using a screen capture application like “Snipping Tool” to crop out a thumbnail and save it as a PNG file.

If you want to embed a video but do not want the relational video links at the end but want the custom thumbnail to load all you need to do is add “?rel=0” (zero) to your video’s URL. That tells YouTube not to load related videos and to load your thumbnail once the video plays thought.

Why would you want to perform these two actions?

  1. You are creating a training video that you want to be shown on YouTube.
  2. You created an advertisement video for your organization.
  3. You do not have much control over the relational videos that are displayed and one that has inappropriate content or thumbnail might be loaded at the end of your video. Like if you are a school and a related video related to sex education appears at the end of your video.

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions.

Adding an email group to Google Applications for Education

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Here is a brief post on adding an email group to your organization in Google Applications for Education. The reason to add groups is so that multiple recipients can receive the email sent to a single address. This will guard against request not being processed when one person is out on vacation or move on to new life adventures.
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