Troubleshoot Email Delivery Issues with Google Groups and Help Scout

If you're using a Google Workspace Group (formerly known as G Suite) to forward emails to your Help Scout Inbox, troubleshooting email delivery issues is a bit different than it is with other email configurations. 

Sometimes the Google spam filter will catch an email that you wanted to come through, and you'll find it waiting in a moderation queue at Google. Sometimes it can be other issues that you can discover at the Google Email Log Search. This article will show you how to check the moderation queue for your Google Group, then check the email log to investigate further if you need to. 

Check the Group Moderation Queue at Google Workspace

Google Groups' default spam filter settings are to send suspected spam to moderation. This means that if you have not changed the default settings, when the Google spam filter thinks a email may be spam, that email goes into a moderation queue for the Group. You will need to approve the email for it to be delivered to the Group, which will then forward it to Help Scout.  

Take a look at Google's help article Approve or block new messages and scroll to the section there titled Approve or reject pending messages for instructions to view the moderation queue and approve a message. 

If you find that emails are going to moderation that should not be there often, you may choose to change your Group settings. See Google's help article Legitimate mail to a group is marked as spam for the steps to change those settings. 

Search the Email Log at Google Workspace

If you did not find the missing email in the moderation queue, the next step is to search the email log for your Google Group. 

Your Google Workspace administrator can access the Google email log search directly here: Google Admin Email Log Search. 

1

Select the date range you'd like to search, the enter the customer's email addresses in the Sender field and your Group's email address in the Recipient field. Click the Search button to start the search process. 

2

If there are any matching results, they'll appear in a table on the search results page. If you do not see the email in the logs at Google, the email did not reach your Google Group so did not reach Help Scout. You may want to reach out to Google support to see if they can provide you more information in that case. 

If you do see the message you are looking for, click on the subject for more details.

3

The Message details section will show the basic details. Click the arrow next to your group email address in the Recipient details section to expand for full details.

If you do not see Sent to group members in the details, you'll want to reach out to Google support for more help. They will be able to explain the log and the reason it failed. 

If it does show as Sent to group members in those full details, but you don't see the corresponding message in your Help Scout Inbox, copy the Message ID field and paste that into a message to our support team. We'll take it from there!