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Comment by scottfr | Hacker News Reader

Google Groups is heavily used within Google's ecosystem. Specifically it is:

- a system for managing group-based access for Google Workspace users, e.g. share a Google Doc with a group to give all members access

- a system for managing group-based access to Google Cloud Platform resources, e.g. share a BigQuery table with a Google Group to give all group members access to it.

- a simple way for Google Workspace users to create shared email addresses. e.g. support@mycompany.com

It serves these purposes quite well.

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Yes, Google Groups is used for much more than emails. That's not the point of the article though.

I believe the subtext of that comment is that they feel it can't be "left to die" as Groups is too important in the ecosystem.

Yes, but for those purposes it doesn't matter if the email features are left to die, such as the monospace fonts that don't render or the message read/unread status that's flaky.

People send emails with monospace fonts to internal Google Groups all the time. If there is a bug in the external Groups, there likely? is a bug in the internal Groups. If that's true, then it will be fixed soon.

The internal read/unread indicator has always been janky as well. But the point is that Google depends too much on Groups internally to let it die.

I find it surprising that people use the groups webapp as a way to read the email. Isn't your email client more convenient?

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but never beem responsible for anything close to Groups.

I think the main part that the article is referring to is the decaying remains of Dejanews specifically and the historically relevant usenet archived therein. That part seems to have no actual maintainer.

Google Groups in GCP appears to be moving to the Cloud Identity product, so it’s plausible that Google Groups (the product) might be languishing while the internals are copied into other systems? (Or maybe nothing is being copied and Cloud Identity is just exposing another view into Google Groups?)

I think it's more than using Groups in the prior way was really more of a hack than an appropriate, mature solution for that piece of IEM, and now GCP has a product that's fit for purpose.

Fwiw, internally at Google, Groups is used for membership/access management in a "light" (self-administered for access to things that usually aren't particular sensitive) way, but for more serious ACLs there are other products. The nice thing about Groups is just that it's dead easy for non-technical users, and it solves the other problem which is retention of email content for longer than Google's retention policy -- IOW, tribal knowledge.

Is that not "Google Groups for Workspaces" vs the newsgroups style public Google Groups this article is talking about?

It's the same thing...

Some of them have migrated away from Google Groups

Example - Google App Engine group has moved away from Google Groups to Google Cloud Community [1]

1. https://groups.google.com/g/google-appengine

App beta distribution on Play.

Also this is just the external user facing side. Internally Google Groups are used extensively for all sorts of things.

Also, don't Google emails by default have a 6 months expiry and the Groups is a way to preserve knowledge instead of relying on emails?

By default there's no Gmail expiration (that I know of). Deleted messages are kept in the Trash folder for 30 days and then permanently deleted, but archived emails exist forever (provided you still have space left).

I was talking about the Google internal Gmail, not the public Gmail. I am sure that one has a default expiry for normal emails at least. Did you try checking your inbox for anything > 6 months old?

Seems like astonishingly bad engineering.

Simple shared email addresses maybe, but Groups is far from "Shared Gmail" when it comes to even basic features like tagging and archiving.

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