Emailing a Smart Group in Address Book
The OS X 10.4.2 Address Book allows you to create Smart Groups but Apple Mail doesn’t know how to send an email to them. Here’s a work-around.
Like smart mailboxes in Mail and smart folders in Finder, you can use Address Book’s smart groups to create an automatically-updating list of people to match the criteria of your choice–all the “sales consultants” in your Address Book, everyone who lives in a particular city or state, everyone with a .Mac email address, everyone with a birthday in July, all those with “drinking buddy” in their Notes field, or whatever.
However, Apple Mail can’t address an email to a smart group. To work around this, create a normal group and drop your smart group inside it.
You won’t see the group members in the middle column of the Address Book as you do with normal groups, but double-clicking on it will open the smart group’s contents. The smart group inside the normal group will continue to update automatically. Type the name of the normal group into the To: field and Apple Mail finds it. Neat.
No longer needed in 10.4.3
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November 1st, 2005 at 10:27 pm
[...] In fact, you don’t need to drag it. Just type the name of the Smart Group into the To, Cc or Bcc field of the Compose window and Mail.app finds it and inserts the addresses. That means this work-around for Address Book Smart Groups is no longer needed. Vale! Technorati Tags: Apple Mail, Address Book, Smart Group, Mail.app [...]