Q: Why did my Google Groups membership get renamed to username-google at mit.edu ?

Context

• MIT Google Apps at http://www.google.com/a/mit.edu
• Google Groups memberships

Answer

Prior to August 22nd, 2012 Google hosted an un-administered "Google Apps for mit.edu" and allowed anyone with an username@mit.edu address to sign up for it. If you did this at some point, and whether you actually used the account after that, Google would have associated your username@mit.edu address with that account unless you also had it configured as an alternate address for your personal Google account.

On Sep. 5th Google migrated its Google Apps accounts to a new infrastructure shared with personal Google account, and accounts in the MIT Google Apps domain had to be renamed to username-google@mit.edu to prevent name conflicts for everyone who was using their username@mit.edu address with their personal Google account.

In some cases Google propagated these changes to Google Groups memberships. So you may find that your membership in a Google Group shows you as username-google@mit.edu where it used to show you as username@mit.edu.

Group Administration

If you are a Google Groups administrator, it is safe to rename all of these members to their original username@mit.edu names. This will provide the best experience to members going forward.

Mail delivery

This will not affect your ability to receive mail from the group. Mail forwarding was put in place for all the username-google@mit.edu addresses, so mail should be delivered to your MIT account as before.

Sending mail

If sending mail to the Google Group is restricted to members, you may get an error if you try to send mail to the group from your username@mit.edu address.

As a short-term work-around, you can send mail from your username-google@mit.edu alias if your email program allows you to specify alternate "From" addresses. In Gmail you can set this up in the "Accounts and Import" tab in Gmail settings, by specifying a "Send mail as" address.

As a longer-term fix to the problem, you will want to request that your membership be updated to point to your username@mit.edu address. In some cases you can do this yourself by joining the group again from your normal MIT address. In other cases the group administrator may need to make the change for you.

Nicknames in the domain

This is a possible alternative solution we are looking into. We have not been able to confirm whether it will actually resolve the issue in Google Groups completely. We have the ability to set nicknames for accounts in the MIT Google Apps domain. It is possible that setting your username as a nickname for your username-google account will do the right thing in Google Groups. Note that it will still cause a potential conflict if you are using your username@mit.edu address with a personal Google account as well. Updating your Google Groups membership is still the best solution to this problem, but if you'd like to try setting a nickname in the domain, please contact google-help@mit.edu.

See also

• [archive:Why user names were changed to username-google in Google Apps for MIT]
• MIT G Suite for Education