Address Book Group for Individuals with multiple email addresses?

ErikL17,

There are two ways that you can do this....

1) The first keeps you entirely within Mail and Address Book. Simply create a new group for each secondary type of email address to which you'll send. So, you'll have one group named "Team-home," and another named "Team-work." Obviously, you will set up the "Team-home" group with a Distribution List that includes everyone's home email address, and the "Team-work" with their work email addresses. You would then send emails to both groups (not a big deal).

2) The second method is the "manual" method that takes advantage of a couple cool features of OS X. Open Text Edit. Copy and paste addresses from Address Book into your Text Edit document, and format the results as a comma-delimited list. Like this: "fred@aol.com,fredjcrew@work.net,linda@anywhere.com,lindaswinda@herhouse.uk," etc. All with no spaces.

Include any and all addresses to which you want to send your email. When the list is complete, copy the entire thing (Command-A), then click on your selection and drag it out to your Desktop.

Now, under normal circumstances, dragging selected text out of a document results in a " Text Clipping" that works like a portable clipboard. In this case, however, the Finder is using "data detectors" to identify this as an email distribution list. The result will be a ".mailoc" file. Double-click this file to automatically open a new message in Mail, addressed to every email address in the list.

Scott

Erik,

It's not that it "can't," the fact is it doesn't. There's a somewhat different paradigm concerning what is considered a "group." In Address Book and Mail, it is a single "Distribution List." That list includes one email address for each contact.

The paradigm goes further, with the assumption that the "To:" field of a single email can be populated with multiple contacts or multiple groups (or a combination of both). In many ways, this becomes a more flexible workflow when composing messages.

OK, perhaps it doesn't work as well as something else might for your specific application in this case, but it would be more functional for other situations. I'll give a great example...

You are a public school teacher, and you are "District Chair" in your field's regional professional organization. You will have the colleagues with whom you work at your school, but then you will have many others in your same field employed at other schools across your region. As District Chair, you frequently communicate with this second group of individuals via email. You know all of them personally, and consider many "friends."

All of the individuals in this second group, which you could be considered to "support," will have multiple email addresses, and you necessarily must have at least two: a "school" email address, and a "home" email address. In such a scenario, one thing that is ever-present in your mind when sending out messages is that you are sending to official public school email addresses.

Now, let's suppose you come across something pertinent to your profession, but it is humorous, perhaps satirical, and not something you would want to send via "official" channels. This could just be something funny that you wanted to forward to your District members. If your only "Distribution List" contained every email address of every contact, you would be stuck. At the very least, sending this one email would require an onerous amount of work.

On the other hand, the current Address Book/Mail paradigm works quite well for this, because your District members are included in two Distribution Lists: one for their "home" email and one for their "school" email. If the message you want to send is only appropriate for one or the other, you're set. If it must go to both, you're set.

So, I'm going to recommend again that you set up 2 groups (or more, if called for), and populate those groups according to type of address. I won't entertain the idea that either typing or dragging two separate groups into the address field in Mail is an onerous task, or a "workaround." It is neither. 😉

Scott

ErikL17,

ErikL17 wrote:
Unless there was a way to group multiple groups?

By George, you've got it!!!

I tested this. You can, in fact, simply drag multiple group into any other group, thereby "concatenating" the dragged groups into the one. Here's what I have found:

The resulting "all" list will show the other groups with a "group" icon at the top, then the individual contacts within all "nested" groups will be listed below. There will only be one entry for each contact.
One does not edit the Distribution List for this "All" group; each contact within the list- if it is displayed- will only show a single address selected. Instead, one edits the Distribution Lists of the nested groups as appropriate.
Now, while only one contact listing, with one address each, will appear in the "All" group, an email addressed to this group will be populated with all addresses from all "nested" groups.

In other words, we have found the gold-plated solution you seek! What say you??

Scott

I have been following this, with the exact same issue. Your suggestion WORKS GREAT for me.

🙂

I have been trying to do the same kind of thing, but I am still having trouble figuring it out. Do I still have to create multiple contacts for each email address? For example, I have 3 email addresses that I use. So do I need to have 3 duplicates of my name in address book with one email address each so I can then drag them into separate groups? Or is there any way to change the primary email address for each group so that my name is only in there once?