Google domain alias stops propagation of alias email addresses

Posted: April 22, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Google, Google GAM | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

Well Google support have really let me down this weekend.

We needed to move our old domain into the Google fold, so on Friday night we created the domain alias, created and verified all the records that were required. The blurb says that it can take 24 hours to make the changes. Fair enough Google has a lot of servers 🙂

 

Well Sunday morning comes and the email alias names stopped half way through. Calling Google support gets me a call reference and escalation to the engineering team, Monday morning comes and it still broke !!!!!

 

So taking matters into my own hands I try Google GAM. This guide is based on a windows machine. GAM  is written in Python. You therefore will need Python installed. Google is your friend here.

 

The wiki for this is really good, but if your in a rush here are the salient points that you will need.

Once you download the relevant package and unpack it. Open a command line and navigate to the folder, or if you have unpacked it in a PATH then you can just run gam.

Any way once the GAM.exe is located

 

gam info domain

 

Answer the questions, they are very straight forward, I am a domain admin for my Google environment, I have a feeling that this is required. When prompted to pick which API to use choose the default which is all and option 16 to continue.

This will have created the environment required. Now the easy part.

To get the propagation moving again you need to create an alias against the people that are waiting for the new domain alias.

 

e.g.   Exiting domain acme.com

New domain acme.co.uk

User john smith

So it pretty easy

 

gam create alias dummy_1 user john.smith
gam delete alias dummy_1


This will create the alias for both acme.com and acme.co.uk for the dummy_1, but more importantly it will also create john.smith@acme.co.uk.


I only have 190 users so a quick down load to a spreadsheet using the


gam print users username firstname lastname > users.csv


command, gave me all of the users in the Domain and then a quick bit of formula to create the gam create and gam delete statements got me what I wanted quickly. You would be able write a script to work through the user list I am sure with out much effort. Time was against me so the spread sheet was easier.


Note also that gam does not appear to work through a proxy server so you will need direct access out of your firewall on port 443.


Good luck if you have any more problems.


 


Al