How Do I Make a Group in Address Book to Send Email To?

Have you found yourself sending email to the same people about the same subjects over and over again? Wouldn't it be easier just to send to one address and have them all get it? It's easy with Groups in Address Book and Mail.

Let's say you send out news and pictures about your family every month or so to the same people. Or you are the secretary for your organization or class and you need to email a list of people regularly. To do this efficiently, what you would want to do is set up a group in Address Book and then send the email to the group name in Mail. It's really simple, so let's take a look at the steps involved.

Make a Group. First, open Address Book and look for the + symbol button below the left column called Group. If you don't see a left column called Groups, you may need to go to the View menu and select Card and Columns to show it. Click the + button and a new group will appear in the column with the name highlighted, ready to be renamed by typing a new one. Go ahead and name it Family or Organization or whatever best describes the group you are going to create.

Next, you need to populate the group with contacts from the list of names in the center column. To do this step, you just need to click and drag the name onto the group name. It's a bit tricky, because if you drag down, you will select names below it. So try to drag straight to the left. You can select several at once to drag together by holding down the Command (Apple) key when clicking on names, then drag them straight to the left and then onto the group name. As you drag, a red badge with a white number indicating the number of names selected will appear.

Once you have the right names added to your group, click on the group name and the center column will just show those in the group. Review and add or subtract as needed.

Create an Email for the Group. If you haven't started an email message yet, you can control-click (right-click) on the group name and select "Send Email to __" and Mail will start a message with the addresses already inserted. Another way to do this is to is to start a new email as you normally do and instead of typing someone's name in the To: field, start typing the group name. It should start to fill in the rest for you.

Now, sometimes you may not want all the addresses in your group showing. Instead, you can just have the name of the group in the To: field. To enable this option, go to Mail menu>Preferences>Composing and make sure "When sending to a group, show all member addresses" is not selected.

So that's all you have to do next time you have pictures of the kids to send to the family or minutes from the meeting to distribute. A little time invested in creating a group will pay off next time you send another email to the same people.

BONUS ROUND. You can create a smart group that will adapt over time to certain criteria. For instance, you can create a smart group with everyone that has a certain business name in their email address or any other criteria you assign. This way people can come and go from the group based on the data in their address card. You can start a Smart Group by selecting it in the File menu in Address Book.

Did this article help you understand email groups? Did we miss something you want to add? Let us know in the Comments section below!

DIG DEEPER

Discover Address Book from Apple's website 
Mac 101: Address Book Tricks from TUAW 
Address Book Tips from macosxtips.co.uk 

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