How to Set Up Routing Settings for Incoming or Outgoing Google Workspace Email Delivery

Quick and easy-to-follow guide for Google Workspace administrators

What is the Routing setting

Routing is the most flexible email delivery setting there is.
You can configure multiple rules that apply to incoming and outgoing email messages sent from and received by users in your Google Workspace account.
You can use it to forward specific types of emails, quarantine or reject them, add auto-BCC, set up a catch-all, and more.

What can you apply the Routing setting to

When you configure this setting, you first select which emails you want to apply the setting to, based on:

Organizational unit
Direction: Sending, Receiving, or Internal Sending / Receiving
Type of recipient: User, Group, or Non-existent
Specific email addresses or domains
Specific senders or recipients

What can you do with the Routing setting

Then, you select what to do with such emails. You have these options:

Add headers
Modify their subject
Re-route to another mail server
Re-route to a different recipient
Add more recipients (BCC)
Bypass spam filters
Remove attachments
Enforce secure delivery
Reject emails
Quarantine emails

How to configure email routing in Google Workspace step-by-step with images

Step 1

In the Admin console at https://admin.google.com, click the Apps icon.

Step 2

Select Google Workspace.

Step 3

Click Gmail. Make sure not to check the box to the left; just click the service.

Step 4

Select Routing.

Step 5

Under Organizational Units, select the OU with the users whose settings you want to update. The same updates will apply to all sub-OUs under the OU you choose.

By default, if you don’t select an OU, you will add your setting to the top OU, named after your domain. This way, you will apply changes to all users in your account.

You can search for an OU to find it faster if you have a large OU structure.

If you’re not familiar with OUs, click here.

Step 6

To the right of the Routing setting, click CONFIGURE.

If you already have existing Routing rules in place, click ADD ANOTHER RULE instead.

Step 7

First, on top, enter a short description of what you’re setting up.

Next, under 1. Email messages to affect, you select which emails to apply your setting to:

Inbound: emails coming in from external people outside the domain.
Internal – receiving: emails received internally from other users in the Google Workspace account.
Outbound: emails going out from this domain to external people.
Internal – sending: emails sent internally to other users in the Google Workspace account.

You can check as many boxes as you want, but you must always check at least one.

Step 8

To continue specifying under what conditions the setting will be applied, scroll to the bottom and click Show options.

Step 9

A. Address lists: check the box to add a list of email addresses and domains. Then you can choose to Bypass this setting for anyone in the list or Only apply it to those in the list.

If you already have a list created for this purpose, click Use existing list. Otherwise, click Create or edit list, and follow the steps in this article. After you set it up, go back here to select it.

Step 10

If you choose the Use existing list option, you’ll see a list of all your lists. Check the box for each one you want to add to your setting.

Step 11

B. Account types to affect:

Users
Groups
Unrecognized (non-existent in your Google Workspace as a user, group, or alias)

If one of these boxes is unchecked, its type of email address will not be affected by the setting.

For example, you may set up a routing rule that should apply to all users but not groups. In this case, keep the Groups box unchecked.

Step 12

C. Envelope filter allows you to apply this rule only when specific email addresses are the senders or recipients.

For example, you only want to have the routing work when the sender is [email protected] Then you should check the square ‘Only affect specific envelope senders’ and type the email address [email protected] under Single email address.

You can also set the envelope filter for a group in your domain or enter a regexp. Learn more about regexp (regular expressions) in Google’s Help Center.

Step 13

Now that you’re done setting up the requirements for the routing rule to apply, it’s time to specify what it does.

You do this under 2. For the above types of messages, do the following – you can leave it on Modify and choose how to modify it by checking the boxes below or click Modify and select Reject or Send to spam quarantine.

Let’s cover the options under Modify first – they are the following:

Step 14

Headers – lets you add custom headers to messages. For example, you can add a custom header matching the description you entered for the setting. This can help you analyze why a message was routed in a certain way or what triggered a filter.

Adding the X-Gm-Original-To header is useful when you reroute a copy of a message, and the new recipient wants to know the original recipient’s address. The latest recipient can see the original recipient by checking the X-Gm-Original-To header box in the message.

Add X-Gm-Spam and X-Gm-Phishy headers to indicate if the message is spam or phishing. For example, these headers will look like this:

X-Gm-Spam: 0 (means that the email is not spam)

X-Gm-Spam: 1 ((means that the email is spam)

Step 15

Prepend custom subject allows you to add something to the beginning of messages’ subjects.

For example, you can set up the routing rule to look for confidential messages only and then have it automatically add [Confidential] to their subject.

Step 16

Change route allows you to re-route messages to another mail server, already added to the Hosts setting as shown here.

Step 17

Change envelope recipient allows you to change the email recipient to another email address, skipping delivery to the original recipient.

Step 18

Bypass spam filter for this message approves messages for delivery automatically, regardless if Gmail’s built-in spam filter thinks they are spam.

Step 19

Remove attachments from this message strips the email of all attachments.

Step 20

Add more recipients adds extra recipients to the email. This acts similar to a BCC, so the sender and recipients of the message won’t know about the additional recipients you have added.

Click ADD to add an extra recipient.

Step 21

Leave it on Basic, then type the email address and click SAVE. Repeat this step to add more recipients.

Step 22

Encryption (onward delivery only) enforces a secure connection using TLS. Gmail uses TLS by default when both the sender and recipient support it. However, it will send messages over a non-secure connection if using TLS is not possible.

This option enforces TLS, and when it’s not supported, messages will bounce instead of being delivered, and the sender will receive an error message.

Step 23

You can also set 2. For the above types of messages, do the following to Reject message. This option bounces emails caught by the routing rule. It sends a delivery error to the sender, which you can customize if you wish.

Step 24

Another option for 2. For the above types of messages, do the following is Quarantine message.

Quarantining allows you to have emails caught by the routing rule go to a quarantine where they can be reviewed and approved or denied before reaching the intended mailbox. See how to add and manage quarantines here.

After configuring your routing rule as needed, click SAVE.

Step 25

This is an example of what it looks like in the settings list.

Please note that it may take up to 24 hours to start working.

You can come back to this page at any time and click Edit to update the setting, Disable to turn it off temporarily, or Delete to remove it permanently.