The Threat of Data Silos
Google Vault is the premier eDiscovery and retention tool for Google Workspace, ensuring that all corporate emails are securely archived for compliance and legal holds. However, Google Vault relies on a critical assumption: it assumes that all corporate communications are actually flowing through the Gmail servers.
What happens if your engineering team configures an automated script to forward all server alert emails to their personal Yahoo accounts, bypassing their Gmail inbox? What if the marketing team configures an inbound routing rule that silently redirects all customer inquiries to a third-party CRM tool, without ever delivering a copy to the user’s Gmail account?
In these scenarios, Google Vault is blind. It cannot archive an email that was routed away before it reached the inbox. To eliminate these dangerous data silos and ensure absolute compliance, administrators must enable Comprehensive Mail Storage.
Understanding Comprehensive Mail Storage
Comprehensive Mail Storage is a global setting within the Google Workspace Admin Console. When enabled, it forces Google’s routing engine to deposit a hidden copy of every single incoming and outgoing email directly into the user’s Gmail inbox, regardless of any custom routing rules, forwarding addresses, or third-party CRM hooks.
These forced copies are invisible to the end-user (they do not clutter the inbox), but they are fully visible to Google Vault, guaranteeing that your compliance archives are 100% accurate.
Step 1: Accessing the Advanced Settings
Because this setting fundamentally alters how the Google routing engine operates, it is buried deep within the advanced Gmail configurations.
- Log into the Google Workspace Admin Console using Super Administrator credentials.
- Navigate to Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Advanced settings.
Step 2: Enabling the Feature
You can apply this setting to the entire domain, or to specific Organizational Units (e.g., only applying it to the heavily regulated Finance department).
- On the left-hand panel, select the target Organizational Unit.
- In the main window, scroll down to the Compliance section.
- Locate the setting titled Comprehensive mail storage.
- Check the box to Enable comprehensive mail storage.
- Click the Save button at the bottom of the page.
The Impact on Vault
The setting takes effect within 24 hours. Once active, the Google routing infrastructure will begin dropping the hidden compliance copies into the users’ accounts.
The next time an auditor opens Google Vault and runs a search for communications regarding a specific client, the search results will successfully include the emails that the marketing team automatically forwarded to their CRM tool. Even though the emails never physically appeared in the users’ active Gmail interface, the Comprehensive Mail Storage policy ensured that Google Vault captured and archived the forensic evidence.