Create an Address Book Group directly from e-mail with multiple recipients

I want to take an inbox e-mail with multiple recipients and convert the collection to a GROUP in CONTACTS.

These are the steps I just took. I'm on a Mac with Lion 10.7.5 OS. I also tried this on Leopard. Sounds like a lot, but it's better than adding addresses one by one.

First, download and install mailscripts: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/9178/mail-scripts/

Once it's installed, you'll find it in the upper right menu bar looking like a scroll. Once you've done this, you won't have to do it again.

Create a new group in your address book.

Then create an email or forward an email and move your recipients into the "To" line.

Go to your drafts folder and highlight that new email with those address.

Now go up to your scripts in the menu bar. Select Mail Scripts > Add Addresses. Be paitent for a new window to appear. It should contain all the address from that highlighted email in your draft folder.

Check "select all." Choose the new group you created from the dropdown. Choose the email label from dropdown. Click "Add."

Voila, the names are in a group.

oh my goodness, you have found something I've waited years for (and wondered why Apple doesn't create a script so fundamental to emails)

I've done all you said, but when I clicked "add" to initiate the process i soon thereafter got an error message saying "Contacts got an error: You can only add a person to a group. (1)"

oh, please tell me there's a workaround.

respectfully,

Patrick Lafferty

I assume the "Add" you are referring to is the one in the last step.

If so, several thoughts here. Did individual emails appear in the window that openend when you clicked "Add Addresses" from Mail scripts?

If no, then I suspect you may be selecting an email in the drafts folder and highlighting an unexpanded group (just expand and try again) or an email with undisclosed recipients (no hope there, since they were probably blind copied on purpose).

If yes, indeed there are individual emails displayed in the window, I suspect that one of them has a typo, like a comma instead of a period, or a 2 instead of an @ sign, or there's a URL instead of an email address. I've noticed that those hardly noticeable errors will derail an import.

Best way to test this is to try it with a different email containing just a few addresses that you know to be correct. Let me know if this helps.

Those scripts don't work in 10.9. See Andreas' note here:

http://andreasamann.com/MacOSX/Mail_Scripts

Sorry, Patrick, I'm not using Mavericks yet and didn't notice that we were talking about 10.8 or 10.9. Tuttle says that Mail scripts won't work on 10.9. Maybe my advice will help for those still working on slightly older Mac OSs with 10.6 - 10.7.5. I know I wish I had discovered this solution a while ago. It would have saved me lots of time.

Just to note that this is the 10.9 Mavericks forum.

Let the record show that when I attempted the process all over again and created a new group name for the collection of emails, everything went well. It worked without incident.

and this was in 10.9

thanks for the help--thanks more so for the script!

patrick

I'm so glad it worked for you Patrick. I fear I wandered into a forum (on Mavericks) that was outside my knowledge base, but it's great that it worked anyway. Having worked on Macs since the very first 128K version, in 1984, I'm finally old enough to have time to browse these forums, but don't really know the etiquette yet. (sorry about that Tuttle).

If you get an opportunity to check the icon that says I helped you, you will be my first points earned, and I will be grateful to you. Thanks.

received an error message "you can only add a person to a group" contacts did not load to group.