Emailing groups of people

20 February 2013, 09:00

Ever need to email a group of people the same message?

No matter the number of people the Mail and Contacts apps in OS X provide everything you need to make it easy, as follows:

1. Open Contacts and create a new group by clicking the entry on the File menu. Groups are simply collections of individual contacts, and the name you create for the group can be a word or a handful of words separated by spaces.

2. Click All Contacts at the top left, then browse through your list of contacts and add relevant people to the group by dragging and dropping them onto the new group. Alternatively you might be able to save some time by creating a Smart Group, which can automatically select people based on common characteristics — see Tip 175 in Mac Kung Fu 2nd Edition.

3. Once you’ve created the new group you can close the Contacts app. Then open a new mail in the Mail app. In the To: field, type the name of your new group. Once you hit tab or Return, all the email addresses of the contacts in the group will be inserted automatically.

Remember that some mail servers won’t let you send mail to a lot of recipients, in a bid to avoid relaying spam messages. Gmail will lock your account if you attempt to sent to more than 500 people, for example.

Know better?

 
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