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GMail Adds Group Mailing List Functions
January 10, 2008 - 1:36 pm PDT - by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins 13 Comments
The uzi fire rapid rate of GMail feature releases has slowed a bit, but it hasn’t quite stopped. Today, Robby Stein one of Google’s Product Marketing Managers, announced the ability to create personal mailing lists with the GMail contact manager.
It comes in handy particular for Web 2.0-style businesses like Mashable, where almost everything we do operates out of the Google suite of tools, or other similar Web 2.0 tools. Being able to send out an email to the “Writer’s Department” or “Entire Mashable Crew” is a big time saver, as opposed to plucking out each individual’s emails from the address book.
The new features are compatible with IE7 and Firefox2, and are extremely simple to do (I had a few groups set and actually used in under five minutes). From the instructions at the GMail blog:
To create contact groups, click “Contacts” from the left-hand navigation list and then click the groups icon:
After naming your group, browse for contacts you want to add to it. You can find them by clicking “All Contacts” or by searching by name or email address. Once you locate the contact you’d like to add to your group, click on the contact name, and select the “Groups” drop down menu in the right-most pane. You can add any contact to a group this way — or make impromptu new groups. (You can also add people to groups by clicking a group name and then typing email addresses or names in the search box at the bottom of the middle pane).
The great thing about creating contact groups is that they “auto-complete”: you can type the group name as you normally would type email addresses or contact names, and by selecting the group from the drop down menu, the group’s contacts are automatically inserted. Your email recipients will not see your group name when they receive the email, but instead will see all the individual contact names and email addresses listed as normal.
While this feature is great for creating efficient ways to email small groups, we encourage you to use Google Groups to manage large ones.
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13 Comments
Groups have been in Gmail for quite a while. I’ve been using them for at least a year…unless I am missing something obvious that is new.
By “mailing lists,” do you mean one-way distribution lists, or discussion lists? Being able to group recipients is pretty standard (and I think, as xxdesmus notes, not particularly new), but if the group I create and e-mail can then reply and automatically reach everyone else without duplicating the distribution list in a big cc: mess (maybe creating a special e-mail address like subjectline-list-googleusername@google.com) then that’s something special.
@xxdesmus,
Yep it has been around for a while. It is definitely NOT a new feature.
@hawaii,
that would be a cool feature.
@mashable,
I think you should stop giving Google products unnecessary hype. I am with the the two commentators above on this.
Care to explain what you meant by “adds”, when it is there since a long time and Google was definitely not the one to “invent” this feature. Yahoo, Hotmail and countless others had it before Gmail.
This has been there for quite some time. Not news in any sense to me. Most everyone has it. might have been news in jan 07, but not 08. Still, gmail rocks.
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That feature is at least 2 years old. I’ve been using it for quite a while.
How long until the author of the post updates it to reflect all of these comments pointing out that this is not a new feature?
P.S. Let me login to this blog with OpenID.
this is new feature? i have created groups in gmail for a long time ago but it is great feature…
Amazing. I just can’t wait until Gmail catches up to Yahoo Mail circa 2002. I’m sure there will be no shortage of press and praise as they pass this important milestone.
I love how everything Google does is just assumed to have been done for the first time.
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I would like to create a group, and if i send an email to that group reply from anyone belongs to that group should be distributed among the group. it should work as mailing list. kindly guide me in this regard