Gmail: Create a Distribution (Group) List

Contributor Icon Contributed by shamanstears Date Icon January 13, 2008  
Tag Icon Tagged: Google

If you are regularly sending emails to a certain group of your contacts, it can become rather tedious to constantly have to select them over and over again. A better method is to create a Group list that contains these contacts, then you only need to select the list when you wish to send those contacts an email.


1. Go to Gmail and login to your account.

2. Select Contacts from the menu on the left side of the page.

3. Click the New Group button from the Contacts menu.

4. When the dialog box appears, input a name for your group (we will use the name test as an example).

5. The newly added Group will be added to the left column of your Contacts page.

6. Make sure the new group is selected then go to the bottom of the second column and click Add this to group. Input the first few letters of the contacts name and a list will appear. Select the desired contact from the list.

7. The selected contact will be added to the list. Under the name of your list, in the third column, you will see that there is now 1 person in the list and their name appears in the second column.

8. Continue the above steps to add additional contacts to the list. If you add the wrong contact to the list, check the checkbox next to their name (in the second column). The contact will show in the third columns. Click the Groups dropdown and select the group from the Remove from section.

When you wish to use the group, simply compose an email as you normally would, just input the first letter for the group name into the To: section and select the group from the list. The email will then be sent to everyone in the selected group.

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  • David Freeman
    I do appreciate this posting's intent, and would like to say "Thank you" for it.

    I must offer a critical set of remarks.

    This recipe does little good for those seeking to utilize the notion of a distribution group as they've come to know it from the context of other e-mail clients.

    The pared-down approach of only having a single recipient as comprised by a *group* does nothing to answer the inevitable and relevant questions about how to reproduce familiar functionality in the field of the GMail client.

    I found this posting while looking for a recipe for using the GUI to name a single recipient and have each and every member of a user-defined group receive a message that appears to be addressed to a single group name with no explicated CC or TO field constituents.

    Perhaps you can add this, or revise the post with an appeal to the reading community to make it less self-evident than the GMail interface itself.

    Thank you for the starting point!
  • David Freeman
    It strikes me that there may very well be fine reasons why these questions aren't solved by a recipe --whether it be because something's insoluble or perhaps if its very notion presents a transgression of the mail RFCs. Still I think that there are very good reasons for addressing them.
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