Handling reports of abuse and technical issues

This page is for administrators who manage groups for an organization. If you're not an admin and need help managing your own groups, go to the Learning Center.

Manage abusive content

You have several options for deleting and reporting messages that contain abusive content.

Delete content that contains abuse

As a Groups administrator, you can delete any group, and any content posted in groups, in your organization. Group members who have the content moderator permission can delete messages or conversations. Group owners can also delete the groups they own.

Note: You can't restore messages or groups after you delete them.

1. Sign in to Google Groups.
2. (Optional) To locate a group that you don't own, in the left panel, click All Groups.
3. Click the name of a group.
4. Point to a conversation and then check the box beside it.
5. In the upper right, click Delete .

Mark an entire group as abuse

1. Sign in to Google Groups.
2. (Optional) To locate a group that you don't own, in the left panel, click All Groups.
3. Click the name of a group.
4. At the top, below the group name, click More Report group.

Report abusive content to Google

Abuse & postmaster groups

To provide extra control over your message content, you can create abuse and postmaster groups for your organization:

• The abuse group is reserved for reporting spam or abuse in your organization, including content policy violations. When you set up this group, you and your users can forward suspicious messages to abuse@. Google monitors email sent to this address and takes appropriate action.
• The postmaster group is reserved for reporting message-delivery issues in your organization. When message-delivery fails, automated summary messages are sent to postmaster@.

When you set up these groups, you and anyone you designate can receive the emails sent to them to review the issues. This is in addition to Google's monitoring of email sent to the abuse group.

Create abuse & postmaster groups

You can only create the abuse and postmaster groups using the Google Admin console, not in Google Groups (groups.google.com).

When you create groups with the email address abuse or postmaster in the Admin console, you get the following message:

"Settings weren't saved because an error occurred."

Groups are still created, however, and they appear on the Groups list in the Google Admin console.

Note that you can't designate an individual user to use the abuse or postmaster email address. You can only set them up as groups.

Add report recipients

To monitor abuse and postmaster messages, add the people who should receive reports as group members, and set their subscription options. For example, you might want to add your legal team to the abuse@ group and your IT team to the postmaster@ group.

Members receive email sent to abuse and postmaster groups, and the Google team will continue to receive the email as well.

Review reports and logs

Reports submitted through the Google Groups UI are only sent to Google. They aren't copied to the abuse@ email address.

When you view your email log, any messages sent to postmaster@ also appear as attempted to be sent to dasher.postmaster@ but then dropped (not delivered). This is an internal monitoring feature that doesn't affect the normal sending and receiving of messages in your group.

Change abuse & postmaster group settings

If you attempt to change the settings for groups with abuse or postmaster email addresses, you get the following message:

"Group settings could not be updated."

You get this message because you can't change the settings of groups with abuse or postmaster email addresses. You can only add or remove members and subscribe or unsubscribe to email from these groups.

Related topics

• Lock conversations or topics
• Moderate messages
• Understand reserved words