Creating Email Lists in Gmail

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

This week's entry is going to be short, but it is an important one for those of us completing the migration from Outlook to Gmail. We all have groups of people we need to email on a regular basis. Rather than typing in lists of email addresses each time, Gmail offers several different ways to create "Groups." Contact Groups are probably the quickest and easiest.

New Contact Group

The easiest way to create a mailing  list is to create a "New Contact Group." This will allow you to simply paste in a list of email addresses and email to the name of a group. For instance, I just created a New Contact Group for the students applying to be Senior Advisors next year.

Start by logging into Gmail. Then click on the word "Mail" in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Choose "Contacts" from the pop-up list.

If your screen looks like the screenshot below, you are in the "New Contacts Preview." You'll need to exit that first.

On the left-hand side of the screen, click "More" and "Leave the Contacts Preview." Then click "New Group."

You'll be asked to enter a name for the group. Just use a name you'll remember - you'll be able to enter this name later as a "send to" address on an email and message your group. Then click "OK." Click on the name of your new group on the left side of your Contacts page. In this case, I selected "Potential Senior Advisors."

At the top of the page, click the button to add email addresses to your group. It looks like a person with a plus sign next to them.

At this point you can copy and paste a list of emails from an existing message in your inbox or sent messages. Usually, I'll type the names in one time to send an email, then I'll copy the email addresses and paste them into the group.

In the above example, I went to a message in my "Sent Messages," and clicked the button to "Show Details" in the sent messages line. Then I copied all of the email addresses.

Once you've copied the names in, simply click "Add" at the bottom of the text box.

You can now go back to Gmail, and send to the group you've just created. In fact, as you start typing the name of your new group, it should come up as a suggested email address.

By the way, when you select the new group, all of the individual email addresses will automatically populate in the To: line. So, if you want to customize the list (I'm planning a surprise birthday party and don't want to include the guest of honor) it is easy to remove or add names from the list.

Here's a quick video to show you how to create a New Contact Group:

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There are two ways that you can email your classes without creating any lists. If you use Hapara, go to Dashboard and select a class. On the far right of the screen click "Class Info." One of the options you have on that screen is "Email Class."

If you use Google Classroom, you can select the "Student" tab in any class, select all of the students, and click the "Actions" button. One of your choices is Email.