Create an Email Distro or Group Contact for iOS Mail

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you my workaround for creating an email distro or group list for iOS Mail. 

As I’ve said in other videos, iOS Mail is a really basic app. I haven’t found a better option yet, but it does require some hacks and workarounds to approximate a full service mail app.  Here’s is a missing feature that has bugged me for years — there is no way to add an email group in contacts so that you can email the same group of people regularly.  I’m sure you can immediately think of examples in your life, but 2 of mine are an email group that I send photos to once a month and an email group for a discussion series that I lead. Since I can’t create a group of emails, I either have to add each person individually to the email — which is error prone and annoying OR I have to go back through emails, find one that I sent to this group before, forward it, and then delete the old subject and the old email text.  Both of these options are a bit of a hassle. 

I recently figured out a workaround. Here’s what you do:

• First, go into your contacts app and create a new contact.    Name it something you will remember for your group. I’m going to call this one Test Group Email.  
• Okay — now here where it says email, we are going to put in a string of email addresses separated by commas. The grammar rule is: Name space less than sign email address then greater than sign, and then repeat for the next person.
• You are welcome to type all of these in, but again — I found a slightly easier way. Go back and find an email that you already sent to this group and forward it.  See down here in the body of the email?  All of the email addresses are already in the correct format, so just select them, copy and then paste it into the contact. Now save this contact. 
• Okay — we are not quite done. You can’t just use this contact the normal way. In other words, if you open up a new email and choose Test Group Email, it will only bring in the very first email that you have in the group.  That obviously isn’t what you want.
• Instead, you need to open the contact from the app and hit the Mail button. If you do it this way, it includes all email addresses on your email.  You can also do this from the search bar. Like this: search for Test Group Email, tap on the contact and hit Mail to create a new email message. Voila!

It might take a little while to remember to use this workaround, but it will save time in the end. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!