I received an email addressed to several people that I'd like to add to my contacts. Is there a way to add them all at once, or do I need to input their addresses individually?
iMac 27″, macOS 11.4
The Contacts User Guide indicates that you can import a spreadsheet CSV into a new group, which would allow you to input n-tuple names and addresses.
The Contacts User Guide indicates that you can import a spreadsheet CSV into a new group, which would allow you to input n-tuple names and addresses.
Wouldn't I have to input the addresses individually into the spreadsheet? I'm trying to find a way to highlight all the addressees in the group email I received and put them into my contacts all at once without having to key in each address.
Wouldn't I have to input the addresses individually into the spreadsheet? I'm trying to find a way to highlight all the addressees in the group email I received and put them into my contacts all at once without having to key in each address.
There is no way to do that. If you want a list of email addresses, you can select them all and drag them into a Finder window. That will make a text clipping which you can drag into the address field in an email.
I do not see any easy way to accomplish this task using Mail or even Automator.
There are ways to accomplish this but it requires multiple complex steps and would only be beneficial if you had a rather large number of contacts you wished to import in this manner and needed to repeat the process many times. It would involve scripting and or programming. In most cases the effort exceeds the time it would take to just manually add each contact one at time. It would have to be hundreds of people in the list before I even attempted such automation.
Basic overview of the process might be to forward the email and copy the TO:, CC:, BCC: lines containing all the names and email addresses and paste them into a text file. Then once they are in a plain text file there are a million different ways to reformat the file to either CSV or vCard format. I could search and replace using a programming editor or I could use UNIX commands in Terminal to manipulate the text (SED, AWK, TRIM, CUT, XARGS, etc.). I could use a more powerful scripting language such as Python or Ruby to do it. But again, this can be a lot of work for a one-off operation that you might not be repeating. If it's something you really need to do often then it might be worth coding a custom App in Swift to do it.
Bottom line, it's possible to do most anything but is it worth the time and effort?
I was afraid that was the case. I realize I can just use Reply All from a previous email, but I wanted to create a group in my address book and was looking for a simple way to do that. As you pointed out, that may well be more trouble than it's worth. But I appreciate your reply.
Correct. You would have to build out the CSV with the individual contact fields. As has been said elsewhere, you cannot select just email addresses and copy/paste them into Contacts.
… and was looking for a simple way to do that.
While it’s not a group in contacts, a text clipping can be dragged into the address field. It’s not really any more difficult.
can you add a group of names to contacts all at once
