What are Groups and Functional Accounts

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Situation	You are setting up or modifying your system and are unsure what the differences are between Groups and Functional accounts.
Solution	Details on Group or Functional Accounts and the differences between them.

Difference between Groups and Functional Accounts

Under the Administration- User Management area are the following options:

Users
Groups
Functional Accounts
SMTP Discovery

Groups within Proofpoint Essentials

These are different than ones found within Exchange (i.e. Distribution groups or security groups).
These are only for administrative purposes.
Multiple users (already within Proofpoint Essentials platform) can be combined to form a group.

Once a group is formed, the following actions can be performed (under profile):

Group Name	Give the Group an appropriate name.
Group Description	Give the Group an appropriate description.
Notification Language	Select the desired language from the dropdown options.
Remove Members	Remove members from the Group.
Add Members	Add members to the Group.
Group Filters	Add an inbound or outbound filter to the Group.
Sender Lists	Create a list to allow or block select senders for the Group.

Under the Administration > User Management > Groups all the groups can be seen. If you go into the individual groups you can see details like Users and Filters per group. Every group has group logs as well.

Functional Accounts within Proofpoint Essentials

Functional Accounts allow you to add within the Proofpoint Essentials platform all email enabled Distribution Lists / Security Groups / Public folders that exist in the customers local Active Directory which do not already exist in Proofpoint Essentials. They can be found in Administration- User Management- Functional Accounts.

Each Functional Account has the below features:

Profile	Name, Email address, and Account type (i.e. security Group or Distribution Group).
Aliases	Any additional Email addresses associated with that Functional account.
Spam	All the spam settings for this account are accessed here.
Digests	Settings for the quarantine digest.
Groups	Details about the Group that the Functional Account is a part of.
Filters	Inbound/Outbound filters.

Functional accounts can be added manually, via AD sync, or Azure sync.

Functional accounts DO NOT have the ability to log in for any alerts.

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