How To Create Your Very Own Outgoing Mailing List For Gmail

Gmail is easily one of the best email clients or services around and it has at least one hidden feature that many likely don’t know about. Namely, the ability to create a mailing list using the Contacts UI and then send emails to that list at a single entry in Gmail. Or, more specifically, with the entry of a single name or label.

Well, that’s exactly what this guide is here to help with. So let’s get started.

Here’s how you can create your own Gmail mailing list to save time

The benefit of creating a mailing list for those you frequently contact as a group is that it saves time. More accurately, it saves time entering multiple email addresses or contacts. But it also goes a long way toward ensuring that you don’t miss anybody. Specifically, that you don’t miss anybody when sending out emails to multiple recipients.

That’s useful if you happen to have a lot of coworkers who are on projects with you. But it’s not just helpful in business or enterprise situations. It can also be incredibly time-saving and useful if you need to email multiple people for other reasons. Such as putting together and sending out wishlists to the family for children’s birthday and holiday presents.

Precisely how much time that ultimately saves, of course, comes down to how efficiently you use the feature. And that isn’t, in and of itself, the most intuitive process. So let’s take a closer look at how this can be accomplished.

Create a new group for your mailing list in Contacts

First, you’ll need to create a contact group — Google calls these “labels” — via the Contacts service. This is what you’ll utilize later on in Gmail. It’s worth noting, right from the start, that this doesn’t seem to work for any labels containing contacts that don’t have an email address. So you’ll likely need to create wholly separate Contacts groups for your Gmail mailing list. Setting that aside, the steps are really quite simple.

1. The easiest way to create a mailing list for use in Gmail is direct via the Contacts service and site. So you’ll need to start by opening your favorite browser. We’re using Chrome in our sample images
2. Navigate to the “contacts.google.com” site
3. Log in, if you aren’t already logged in, with the email you plan to send from
4. On the primary Contacts page, start by selecting the “Create Label” chip at the bottom left-hand side of the UI
5. Type in an appropriate name for the label — we’ve named our label “Test” in our sample images
6. Select the “Save” option to create the label. The new label will now appear in the left-hand sidebar
7. Now, select the “Contacts” option from the left-hand sidebar. It will be near the top. The page will now show a list of all of your contacts
8. Select contacts that you’d like to add to the mailing list for Gmail — and/or create contacts, as needed — for any email addresses that aren’t saved as contacts. You can select them by tapping or clicking the square checkbox at the left-hand side of their name. The box only appears when hovering over the contact name
9. Once selected, choose the tag-shaped label icon from the top bar UI
10. Select your new label from the list. In our examples, that’s the “Test” label. Google will display a blue check next to the list name
11. Tap or click on the “Apply” option at the bottom of the pop-out menu
12. Select the new label from the left-hand sidebar to confirm that the contacts were added
13. You can repeat steps 7 through 12 as needed to add more email addresses over time. Or steps 4 through 12, if you need more than one mailing list

Here’s how to use your new label in Gmail

Now that you’ve gone through the trouble to create a group to use for your mailing list in Gmail, it’s time to see how you can actually use it. Although it’s also worth noting that you won’t necessarily, at least not for most users right now, be able to use these groups in emails sent via mobile. As is sometimes the case with our guides, the mobile version, unless Gmail is used online in Chrome or another browser, simply doesn’t support it.

And this part is incredibly simple.

1. Open up Gmail in a web browser — as noted above, this doesn’t seem to work in Gmail for Android or in other app versions of Gmail
2. Tap the “Compose” button, located at the top right-hand side of the UI
3. In the field labeled “To” enter the name that you gave your Contacts group label. In our case, that’s “Test”
4. It’s worth noting, again, that this won’t necessarily work with all of your Contacts groups. In fact, if any contacts within a group don’t have an email associated, that group doesn’t appear to register in the Gmail client at all. So if your group isn’t showing up, you may need to go back to Contacts and remove any that don’t have emails associated with them from the group
5. The “To” field — or any other recipient field you’re using — will auto-populate with the emails found in the Contacts group
6. Send your email as you normally would and all recipients should receive it