ad hoc address groups in gmail?

April 16, 2007 2:45 AM

Gmail question, here's the scenario: I want to forward an email to an ad hoc list of people (meaning, not a group I've forwarded to before, or am likely to again). I open the email, I hit reply, and on the To: line, I click....what?

Do I really have to type in all the contacts by hand? I know google just asks for the first few letters, but there's a dozen or so addresses and I don't necessarily know the first few letters of each of them.

Is there any easy way to do this? (for instance, the way Outlook works, by popping up a list of contacts that you can add to the to: line one by one)

posted by stupidsexyFlanders to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Doesn't it pop up addresses if you type the peoples' names as well? e.g. for John Smith ([e-mail]), I can start typing "jsmith" or "John" and both will pop up with "John Smith [e-mail]" as one of the suggestions.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:58 AM on April 16, 2007

Or go to your Contacts page, check the boxes next to the people you want to mail, and click the Compose button at the top.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:59 AM on April 16, 2007

re: my second suggestion - I missed that you wanted to forward an email. You can always just copy the email before going to the Contacts page to select addresses, then paste it into the new email.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:04 AM on April 16, 2007

That's clearly where Gmail has a usability pb. Sometimes you want to send a mail to various people in your contact list, but if you first click on "new message" then you can't see your whole list of contact and add addresses. This is frustrating.

What I've done so far is to write my message and then press A, B, C etc. and include contacts in the TO: line.
posted by vincentm at 3:10 AM on April 16, 2007

You're clicking in the wrong line. What you want is the bcc line not the To: line, unless this ad-hoc group of people desperately needs to know each other's e-mail address.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:51 AM on April 16, 2007

You could break the conversation/compose/forward into a new window by clicking "new window" in the upper-right corner (near "expand all", etc). Then in the original window, navigate to your contacts list and copy back and forth.

It would sometimes be nice to be able to click on "To" and then build a recipient list with checkboxes. But, well, you can't.
posted by Plutor at 5:49 AM on April 16, 2007

Not that it's relevant to the actual meat of the question, but I'm going to second Deathalicious here and say that you should be doing this as a blind carbon copy, unless all of these people already know each other.
posted by mikeh at 8:30 AM on April 16, 2007

It might not solve your problem, per se, but Gmail has something called Contact Groups. You still have to manually add the contacts to the group, so it probably wouldn't help out if the group will only ever receive one email. At the same time, perhaps a small segment of your groups will always receive your email, so you could create a group for, say, that 60% segment, which would only leave the remaining 40% to be entered by hand every time.
posted by Hankins at 9:26 AM on April 16, 2007

I usually type "a" and select name by name that pops up, then "b", etc.
posted by AnyGuelmann at 11:15 AM on April 16, 2007