Texting: Selecting multiple recipients at once (by "ticking") should be supported

The contact list in iPhone need an option to select multiple contacts.

In my old Nokia I could go to Options->Mark several or Mark all. This allowed me to type in some text in the search field, get a particular set of people from my vast contact list and select all or only some of them. It was convenient for texting several people, batch deleting, or sending several business cards to someone.

To send a text to multiple people in iPhone would require me to pre-arrange a group or to add people in the To: field one-by-one. This is an inconvenient way for me, as I have to type in the search field every time and scroll through contacts I decided not to include.

I'm asking Apple to include the following feature in future updates. When I'm prompted to pick a contact from a contact list (or at least in the "Messages" only), swiping the contact left would open a "Mark" ("Tick") key, so a can add several contacts to the recipient's list by using only one swipe and one touch per contact. The same should work when a text is entered in the Search field, so that i pick from among those matching the search text.

In Nokia the contacts had "ticked" or "non-ticked" sign on the right. In iPhone, to save the screen space, selected contacts may instead be highlighted in a particular color.

If this feature was not anticipated until now to make spamming harder, then the number of contacts per sending can be limited to, say, 20 or 50. Cellular providers may also set their own limits.