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We use Google Apps as our email service provider.

I would like to prevent a user from sending or receiving any new mail, while preserving this person's access to the archive of historical messages.

We are not currently using Postini.

Sending: I can't find anything myself.

Receiving: Using Email Delivery, I see that I can turn off all email delivery options so that no messages will be delivered. It seems, though, that this would fail silently, and I'd prefer to have an auto-responder up or to have the sender get a Not Deliverable notification.

Is there a way to do this?

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You should be able to restrict inbound/outbound mail fairly simply. Under "Manage this domain" create a new organization under "Organization & Users". Name it "Restricted users" or some such.

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Select the user account(s) you want to restrict. Select "Move to" and choose your new organization.

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Under "Advanced tools" scroll down to "Restricted email delivery". Add the organization you just created and do not add any domains under the "Allowed" list. Any member of this organization will now be unable to send/receive new mail.

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You can also limit the features of Google Apps (e.g. Docs, chat, Picasa, etc) using the same organization. Here is Google's documentation on the Restrict email delivery feature.

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  • Wow, that's great. I had no idea this was hidden in there. Bonus: is it possible to customize the 'email forbidden' email that would get sent, or is it just a default message?
    – Benj
    Jul 19, 2011 at 13:07
  • @Benj I don't believe you can customize the message -- at least I see no way to do this is the Google Apps console. I suspect something custom would be the purview of Postini's feature set. As an EDU customer you should have a "real" support contact. I would submit the feature request through them.
    – jscott
    Jul 19, 2011 at 13:09
  • makes sense. FYI, this didn't work until I added at least one domain to the 'allow' list - i used faker.example.com, figuring that no one will really be sending mail to/from that domain...
    – Benj
    Jul 19, 2011 at 21:53
  • @Benj I would have sworn it worked earlier this year with an empty "allowed" list when we tested it. Perhaps something has been "updated"? Thanks for the heads-up regardless.
    – jscott
    Jul 19, 2011 at 22:12

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