Nov 11, '03 10:11:00AM • Contributed by: enoch111
[robg adds: This works in Jaguar as well ... and I figure if one person didn't know about it, there must be more, so here it is!]
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Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
Nov 11, '03 10:11:00AM • Contributed by: enoch111
If you want to send a single email to multiple people, it's simple in 10.3 (I'm not sure if this worked in Jaguar or not, but if it did, I never knew about it). Just open Address Book and add, say, all your friends to a group called "Friends." Then, in Mail, when you want to send an email to all of them at once, in the "To" field, just type Friends and hit Return. All of the people in that group that have an email address in their vCard will now be added in the "To" field. This also works in the CC and BCC fields as well.
[robg adds: This works in Jaguar as well ... and I figure if one person didn't know about it, there must be more, so here it is!]
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Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
Be aware that a bug exists. If you categorize your address books by groups, and one member of the group doesn't have an email address. (i.e. grandma) Then sending email to the entire group will fail. At least until you break apart the group and remove the deviant member. Defeating the purpose of sending to a single group.
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
A year ago, Mail would happily send emails to only those group members having email addresses and ignore the rest. Now it fails. Two steps forward and at least one back. I'm sure this relates to the new "smart" method for displaying email addresses within Mail.app.
A workaround for the bug
After a lot of experimenting, I (re)discovered at least one method that gets around the bug with group emails. Groupings of contacts that are dragged and dropped to an email address field are filtered for those that contain valid email addresses. Don't ask me why this is not the case when groups are referenced using the group name! So, I was finally able to email my entire address book (a bit over 1200 contacts) as follows:
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
If you want to send customized email messages using the address book groups and customized tags, there is a small shareware app that I wrote (I'm only posting this because they're related and could be useful to people who find this page). It's called MailMergeApp and is available here: http://www.objectivelabs.com/mailmergeapp.php. It allows you to do things like Dear $name$ and replaces $name$ with the name from the address book. It works with mail, as well as MailSmith, Entourage, and Eudora. Hope this is useful.
This is a new bug
A year ago, Mail would happily send emails to only those group members having email addresses and ignore the rest. Now it fails. Two steps forward and at least one back. I'm sure this relates to the new method for displaying "recognized" email addresses within Mail.app.
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
I'm surprised Apple added the "Nickname" feature in the new Address Book but didn't make that a sendable address in Mail. It'd be handy to e-mail "Mom". Not that it's hard to type a coulpe characters and let autocompletion take over, mind you, but some people you just don't usually think of by first name.
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
In Jaguar at least, there is a setting in the Mail preferences selecting whether to display all the individual e-mail addresses or just the group's name. After I had once selected it to display only the group's name, I could not switch back. I could unselect the box, but the actual behaviour was stuck at only displaying the group's name.
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
Address Book arbitrarily chooses the first E-mail address (or phone number for faxes) in an address card, so it is not possible to specify which of multiple addresses (or phone numbers) you want a message sent to when the group is chosen.
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
You can choose which email address is used when mailing to a Group by selecting the Group in AddressBook, and going to Edit->Edit Distribution List
Use Mail to easily send emails to Address Book groups
Does anyone know of a way that you can make a rule which will redirect this mail to several users under bcc, so that one user in the group does not know about the other user in the group.... AppleScript? Do I need to invent the wheel or is it already out there? |
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