Setting up Google Mail + MS Teams + Email connector

Question

Setting up Google Mail + MS Teams + Email connector

Ammar Aganovic 60

I'm a bit desperate here, so maybe someone might help...

So our email is hosted on Google Workspace (MX pointing to Google), but for client meetings we sometimes also use have to use MS Teams. Our employees get invited to multiple organizations (clients) and we need to have a flow where our employee gets invited for Teams event, receives email notification and is able to join the meeting. And also send Teams invites to other people.
I also have a connector in Exchange which relays all emails for the domain (InternalRelay domain) to Google, so any email originating from Microsoft would find it way to our Google Mail.

But my understanding is our employees need Exchange license (or at least it providers more meeting features), but when I assign Exchange license to our employees, then the connector doesn't relay the email to Google, it only gets delivered to Exchange Mailbox of the user (which I don't even want). I could set up forwarding for each Exchange mailbox but I don't really want to do that (how could I even forward to the same email address and hope it would get delivered to Google).

What would be the right approach here, how to set it up to simply not have to deal with any mail related topics on Microsoft and have connector relay all email to Google?

Is there a way to dich Exchange and have all the scheduling/inviting/... done in Google Calendar? There is a Teams-Add-On for Google Calendar, but would it even work without Exchange license?

Thank you

Rick Hoebee 0 Reputation points

2024-06-12T05:38:18.3133333+00:00

Hi Ammar,

I'm facing the same problem, did you ever found a solution for this?

Best regards

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Rick Hoebee 0 Reputation points

2024-06-12T05:38:18.3133333+00:00

Hi Ammar,

I'm facing the same problem, did you ever found a solution for this?

Best regards

Answer 1

Kael Yao 37,746 Moderator

Hi @Ammar Aganovic

If the email addresses in Exchange Online are exactly the same as the email addresses in Gmail, the situation may become very complicated and there is no easy solution for this scenario.

There is a Teams-Add-On for Google Calendar, but would it even work without Exchange license?

You can sign-in an account which has no Exchange license, while the meetings created on Gmail calendar will not be synced to the calendar in Teams.

For more details please refer to this link: Schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting from Google calendar

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Ammar Aganovic 60 Reputation points

2023-12-05T07:39:57.26+00:00

Hi @Kael Yao

we can setup whatever address we like, but the clients should not be confused with different email addresses in Email and Teams, we'd like to have a single email address for each employee. What is the best practice here? I doubt we're the only ones using Teams and not having email in Microsoft.

What does the "complicated solution" include? I did have an impression that if I add email forwarding on user level, it would work. But i didn't check the reputation of those forwarded emails regarding DKIM and DMARC.

Is there some reason I can't simply tell Microsoft to respect MX records and deliver emails where it is supposed to? The concept with connectors makes sense to me, but then I don't understand why it doesn't work in my tests as emails don't seem to reach the connector if user has a mailbox.
Kael Yao 37,746 Reputation points Moderator

2023-12-05T08:37:41.8666667+00:00

but the clients should not be confused with different email addresses in Email and Teams

Indeed, that is exactly what is painful in this situation...

To me there is no real best practice available without Exchange as Teams heavily integrate with Exchange.

Without the Exchange mailbox many Teams feature like calendar won't be available.

One possible method I could think of is to remove the email address from the mailbox and only have the onmicrosoft.com email address left as primary email address, while it may need further test to check if there will be issues.

Is there some reason I can't simply tell Microsoft to respect MX records and deliver emails where it is supposed to?

In this scenario, from Exchange side it directly recognizes the mailbox as an active internal mailbox, thus it won't try to deliver the message elsewhere.
Ammar Aganovic 60 Reputation points

2023-12-05T20:20:09.6833333+00:00

But my current setup does seem to work.
So I have 2 domains on Google ( .com and .at, with .com being the primary one and .at being the alias for the primary one), and I also have the same ones on Office 365. But after assigning Office 365/Teams/Exchange licenses I need to set up email forwarding for EACH account and set the forwarding to .at email address. So in my opinion this does "fool" Exchange and Exchange does forward the email to the primary domain hosted on Google (as there are no emails with .at on Microsoft). So it does currently seem to work, but I'm not sure the forwarding part is really sturdy enough. I've setup SPF with outlook entry so I hope it doesn't turn out there is something I missed in my tests. Would you have any concern with my setup.

I'm still puzzled with how other companies deal with this. Do they have different domains for Teams and Email? Or they do what I do?
Kael Yao 37,746 Reputation points Moderator

2023-12-06T02:21:53.4033333+00:00

So in my opinion this does "fool" Exchange and Exchange does forward the email to the primary domain hosted on Google (as there are no emails with .at on Microsoft).

Yes forwarding will work if the email addresses are not exactly the same (in this case the email domains are different).

Since SPF will fail once you forward the message to another domain, you may probably need DKIM and DMARC to bypass anti-spam filters, or you can also add the Office 365 ip addresses to SPF records of the .at domain (which may take more efforts).

I'm still puzzled with how other companies deal with this. Do they have different domains for Teams and Email? Or they do what I do?

It may depend on your company's needs.

If using different domains is possible, to me it might be the solution that causes the least trouble.

There are also some posts in the same situation for your reference:

Using Teams without Exchange Online? Just for Video Conferencing

Switching from Google Meet to Teams - any tips for a seamless switch?

(Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.)
Ammar Aganovic 60 Reputation points

2023-12-06T07:21:01.79+00:00
Yes forwarding will work if the email addresses are not exactly the same (in this case the email domains are different). Since SPF will fail once you forward the message to another domain, you may probably need DKIM and DMARC to bypass anti-spam filters, or you can also add the Office 365 ip addresses to SPF records of the .at domain (which may take more efforts).

To the outside world, both (Microsoft Teams and Google Email) have the same email address displayed, and that's what counts for me. Yes, I use a different address (domain) for forwarding purposes, but besides potential reliability issues, I currently don't see any problems with that.

I don't even see why SPF would fail, because I have outlook in SPF records for both domains (just in case), so Exchange forwarding/sending emails for my domain is a SPF approved operation. At least that's what I thought, but after reading your comment I checked the DMARC report, and it does seem like this setup breaks SPF and the emails are listed under "forwarders" (need to check how that works out for my reject DMARC policy). My test case was sending emails from outlook.com to the .com address, and they do show in my gmail inbox. But I need to do more testing with different users and trace the emails.
Would adding Office 365 IPs instead of include:spf.protection.outlook.com ? Besides, I've already reached the limit of SPF records.
Bypassing antispam filters with DKIM and DMARC... I'm not familiar with it. Does it involve setup on Microsoft or Gmail side? (I guess Gmail since it's on the receiving end)

I've just checked the headers of the received email (sent from outlook to .com domain), I don't see anything problematic with it (no fails, only pass)

ARC-Authentication-Results: i=2; mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@xxxxxxx.onmicrosoft.com header.s=selector2-xxxxxxx-onmicrosoft-com header.b=duY2WU7l; arc=pass (i=1 spf=pass spfdomain=xxxxxxx.com dkim=pass dkdomain=xxxxxxx.com dmarc=pass fromdomain=xxxxxxx.com); spf=pass (google.com: domain of ******@xxxxxxx.com designates 104.47.17.105 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=******@xxxxxxx.com; dmarc=pass (p=REJECT sp=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=xxxxxxx.com Return-Path: <******@xxxxxxx.com> Received: from EUR05-DB8-obe.outbound.protection.outlook.com (mail-db8eur05lp2105.outbound.protection.outlook.com. [104.47.17.105]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id m19-20020a1709060d9300b00a185db0fa80si6368932eji.911.2023.12.05.23.16.20 for <******@xxxxxxx.at> (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Tue, 05 Dec 2023 23:16:21 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of ******@xxxxxxx.com designates 104.47.17.105 as permitted sender) client-ip=104.47.17.105; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@xxxxxxx.onmicrosoft.com header.s=selector2-xxxxxxx-onmicrosoft-com header.b=duY2WU7l; arc=pass (i=1 spf=pass spfdomain=xxxxxxx.com dkim=pass dkdomain=xxxxxxx.com dmarc=pass fromdomain=xxxxxxx.com); spf=pass (google.com: domain of ******@xxxxxxx.com designates 104.47.17.105 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=******@xxxxxxx.com;
Kael Yao 37,746 Reputation points Moderator

2023-12-06T08:13:48.9566667+00:00

If Gmail doesn't recognize the forwarded messages as spam, you can also leave it unchanged.

(As in this setup Gmail is the only recipient that matters)

While if you would like to setup DKIM and DMARC, please refer to these links to setup in Microsoft 365:

Use DKIM to validate outbound email sent from your custom domain

Use DMARC to validate email

Answer 2

We had this same issue. Google Workspace is used for Email. Teams is used for meetings. Teams invites would be received by external users but not internal users who had Microsoft accounts. The invite emails were going to the exchange mailboxes that the users no longer used.

We fixed this by going to EAC > Mail Flow > Connectors and adding a connector from Office 365 to "Your Organization's email server", choose the option for "Only when I have a Transport Rule Setup that Redirects messages to this connector", under Routing enter the 1st Google Workspace MX record for the domain (ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com in our case), click next under security restrictions and use the Google Workspace admin email to validate and make sure the connector is on. Then go to Mail flow > Rules and create a rule that applies if the Recipient Domain is YourInternaldomain.com and Do the Following is Redirect the message to The following connector and choose the connector you just created (If hte connector doesn't show up in the list, make sure the Use this Connector setting is for Rules). This will take any messages sent internally in Exchange online and redirect them to Google. Make sure SPF has both Google and Exchange Online in it (include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:_spf.google.com) so Google doesn't mark it as spam.

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Setting up Google Mail + MS Teams + Email connector

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