Why do some messages contain "sent via groupxyz" in the subject and others don't?

[EHR]

Hi everyone,

I've been running into this issue in our organization lately. We have a number of groups set up to receive email from external senders (customers, suppliers, etc) with multiple internal users being on each group. Recently I've noticed that some emails to these groups are arriving in our employees inboxes with "sent via group xyz" appended to the subject line. When the employee tries to reply all it only replies to the internal group, and does not include the original sender in the reply.

I understand this is happening because of the "sent via group" part of the message (which I think means the group email forwarded it to the employee), but I am unsure why some emails have that appended to them in the first place, and some do not. Some groups do this more often than others, some do not do it at all. All the groups are configured with the same settings.

Any advice on where to begin troubleshooting this would be much appreciated, as it is causing some breakdown in communication with customers not receiving replies to emails.

Thanks!

[KAM]

@EHR Check the Original Sender section of this KB and see if it helps: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9325317?hl=en KAM

[EHR]

Hey @KAM thanks for the info, I'm trying this out now and will report back in a few days if it has made a difference. I appreciate your help! 

[EHR]

Unfortunately this has not fixed the issue, I will continue to investigate. 

[icrew · Accepted solution]

Short version: it has to do with how the sender's email domain is configured for DMARC, and how Google groups adapts to those settings. There's nothing you can do to affect those settings on your end.

Longer version: It's most likely because the domain for the sender of the emails that have the "sent via" appended are set up with DMARC records -- adding the "sent via" is Google's DMARC-compliant way of allowing the message to continue to be delivered to the group. There's a pretty good explanation from a few years ago over at https://support.google.com/a/thread/12457235/google-group-emails-being-sent-to-the-group-show-with-g...

Hope that helps,

Ian

[EHR]

Thank you for this, Ian. I now have a better understanding of what is going on.

I appreciate the time you took to answer my question, and the additional resource provided!