How to send a Gmail to multiple recipients?
February 14, 2010 6:20 PM Subscribe
Asking for a friend: Once every few months, my friend needs to send a mass email to a bunch of folks who have emailed her. She uses Gmail. Because she has never emailed these people before, they do not "pop up" automagically as contacts when she types their name, and there are far too many to make this a practical solution anyway. Any ideas?
We thought about trying to use groups in some way, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to click on each email and add people to a particular sub-group. In other words, she needs to keep them as a distinct group that is separate from her usual contacts. She doesn't email the same people every time this happens (or even the same person two times in a row, in most cases) so building and maintaining a group that she would use each month isn't really practical.
Ideally, there would be some way to check the relevant emails from the inbox and build a list of emails. Right now, she's copying and pasting each email into a Word document manually, and it takes her a couple hours each time. Even if she had to go into each email and do one quick action to build a list, that would probably be better! I poked around the help files, googled, searched here, and I can't come up with anything. Greasemonkey or Firefox solutions would be welcome.
FYI: This isn't a spam/unwelcome email. These people are expecting and waiting for a response from her.
We thought about trying to use groups in some way, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to click on each email and add people to a particular sub-group. In other words, she needs to keep them as a distinct group that is separate from her usual contacts. She doesn't email the same people every time this happens (or even the same person two times in a row, in most cases) so building and maintaining a group that she would use each month isn't really practical.
Ideally, there would be some way to check the relevant emails from the inbox and build a list of emails. Right now, she's copying and pasting each email into a Word document manually, and it takes her a couple hours each time. Even if she had to go into each email and do one quick action to build a list, that would probably be better! I poked around the help files, googled, searched here, and I can't come up with anything. Greasemonkey or Firefox solutions would be welcome.
FYI: This isn't a spam/unwelcome email. These people are expecting and waiting for a response from her.
Couldn't you paste all of the emails into a CSV file, import the CSV file into Google Contacts, select all of the emails within Google Contacts, add them to a group, and type in the group name in the TO bar?
If Google makes you sort through your emails to create a group, why not create a new Gmail account, and add the CSV file to the Gmail account. That way, you could narrow down the contacts to just those you need to email in this case.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:47 PM on February 14, 2010
If Google makes you sort through your emails to create a group, why not create a new Gmail account, and add the CSV file to the Gmail account. That way, you could narrow down the contacts to just those you need to email in this case.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:47 PM on February 14, 2010
I do this all the time. I just keep the emails in an excel file (it could just as easily be a word or plain text file) and copy and paste them into the "to:" field when sending an email n
posted by lunasol at 8:03 PM on February 14, 2010
posted by lunasol at 8:03 PM on February 14, 2010
Um, meant to say, she should be able to copy and paste as a group, not individually.
posted by lunasol at 8:05 PM on February 14, 2010
posted by lunasol at 8:05 PM on February 14, 2010
Has you friend considered an e-mail service like Campaignr? Usually those services let you send up to 50 for free and then it's fractions of a penny after. I used it at a large corporation to send 75,000 a month.
posted by GilloD at 12:07 AM on February 15, 2010
posted by GilloD at 12:07 AM on February 15, 2010
There is also a Google Labs feature called "Don't forget Bob", which keeps track of people you typically send email to at the same time as other people, and pops up some names to click.
That might help a little bit.
posted by jozxyqk at 3:36 AM on February 15, 2010
That might help a little bit.
posted by jozxyqk at 3:36 AM on February 15, 2010
>We thought about trying to use groups in some way, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to click on each email and add people to a particular sub-group
when she gets an email from a person that should be on the list: mouse over the name of the sender, wait till the options box pops up, select "More">>"Contract Details". At this point she can add them to a group of her choice, including creating a new group (e.g. 2010Q1)
hope this helps
posted by pyro979 at 6:21 AM on February 15, 2010
when she gets an email from a person that should be on the list: mouse over the name of the sender, wait till the options box pops up, select "More">>"Contract Details". At this point she can add them to a group of her choice, including creating a new group (e.g. 2010Q1)
hope this helps
posted by pyro979 at 6:21 AM on February 15, 2010
Response by poster: Thanks for the help, everyone. We have a couple of options to try! lunsasol, the group is different (it's rare that the same email would be included twice) every time she sends the emails, so it doesn't seem like keeping groups on tap would help much. It's unfortunate that these are new people that she has never contacted before. Otherwise, it seems like there would be so many additional options!
posted by theantikitty at 7:41 AM on February 15, 2010
posted by theantikitty at 7:41 AM on February 15, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
Go into that tag/folder. Select all the messages. It will only let you select the first 25. Under "more actions" choose "filter messages like these." This should create a filter that includes all the "from" addresses in the first 25 messages. Click "next." At the top of the following page, it should have all the email addresses listed by the From" option. You can then copy and paste these into a new email and just cancel creating the filter. If you have 75 people you can do it three times [you'd need to untag the first 25 emails, repeat]. Not awesome but definitely better than copy/pasting into Word. You may have to hack around with this some, but I was able to get it to a point where I could copy/paste the email addresses for most of the tags that I use in gmail.
posted by jessamyn at 6:35 PM on February 14, 2010 [3 favorites]