How to send email to a group in Gmail on iPad?

April 19, 2016 3:40 PM

I administer the email for a community group and will need to send email to the group while I'm on vacation. I will only have an iPad.

I'm leaving on a road trip in two weeks and would like to get this working before I go. I send email to two groups from Gmail on my computer all the time. When I "compose" a new email, I can start typing a mail group name in the "To:" box, select the group name, and all the emails for that group populate the field.

When I try to do this on my iPad, I start typing the group name but my mail groups don't appear. I've tried this in both Safari and Chrome. I've jumped through hoops to get the desktop site to appear on the iPad (only seems to work in Chrome) and I still can't get my mail group to populate.

Coming at this another way, on my Mac I can show the mail group participants, select all of them and Compose a new email. When I try to do this on my iPad, I can select all emails in the group, but when I click the Envelope icon to compose a new email, my Inbox opens and not a new email window.

Is there any way I can get this to work on my iPad? I really don't want to have to find public computers (libraries?) to do this when it should be so easy to do on my iPad.

(Don't get me started on why Wix doesn't allow websites to be edited on an iPad. That's a whole different problem.)

posted by Joleta to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Can you set up the email from your home computer and save it unsent in your drafts? Then you can just access drafts from the iPad, fill in the content and send.
posted by handful of rain at 3:45 PM on April 19, 2016

our neighborhood list uses google groups, which requires a dedicated admin. Sounds like you are already in that role. If you migrate your list members to google groups, the list will reside at a single email address. if you decide to do this, you should probably check with your list members first.

otherwise, it sounds to me like you are relying on a caching behavior that is either unavailable or unpopulated on your iPad. Have you tried building the address list by hand on the iPad?

Hope this helps!
posted by mwhybark at 3:48 PM on April 19, 2016

Have you only tried accessing Gmail from your web browser on the iPad, or have you tried using the Gmail app?
posted by une_heure_pleine at 4:37 PM on April 19, 2016

Best answer: You happen to have an old email you sent to all of them that you can just "reply all" to and edit, maybe?
posted by Conspire at 5:14 PM on April 19, 2016

Response by poster: Conspire: I didn't think I could do a "reply all" to an email I had sent, but that works just fine. I can edit the subject and body for whatever new email I'm asked to send out.

Handful of rain: I won't know what email I need to send out to the organization until someone asks me to do it while I'm on the road, but that's a good thought if I know ahead of time.

Une heure pleine: I had the same problem in the Gmail app, which is why I thought the desktop version of the site on my iPad would behave the same way as on my computer.

Thanks everyone for your help.
posted by Joleta at 6:16 PM on April 19, 2016

Before you go away, creeate a blank template of the to: field and save as a draft. Do it for all of your possible "to:" groups. Then when on the road, open the draft, fill in the subject and body and hit send. If you think you might need to send multiple or more than one to any group, create several of them in the drafts folder.

Or on post view, what the first answerer said.
posted by AugustWest at 8:48 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]