If you’re here, I guess you’re tired of typing the same email addresses over and over and looking for a way to optimize sending emails to specific groups of people, like your colleagues, family or friends.
well, you’re in the right place! In this short post, we will cover two topics. First, we’ll create a mailing list in Google Workspace and see how you can send an email to this mailing list from Gmail. then we’ll generate an email address for this same group and make sure you get a dedicated space for conversations with your members in your gmail inbox.
To illustrate the following step-by-step instructions, let’s say yoda wants to create a group for all the jedis (yes…we’re star wars fans at gmelius).
create a mailing list in gmail
The process is simple and requires only three steps.
step 1: open google contacts
yoda needs to go to your contact list by opening google contacts. From gmail, google contacts can be accessed by clicking the dots in the top right menu and then choosing “contacts” as shown below.
step 2: create a google contact tag
once in google contacts, the second step is to create a label for the future mailing list, eg “team”, “family”, “friends”. in our case, yoda creates a “jedi” tag. once the tag is created, select all the jedis/contacts you want to add to the new tag.
step 3: use the new list in gmail
The final step is to go back to gmail and start typing the name of the group you chose as a label. All emails that are part of the label (distribution list) will be instantly populated and appear in the gmail compose window. for our good old friend yoda, this will look like this:
and ready! now, feel free to repeat the same steps as many times as necessary if you want to create additional mailing lists.
create a group email in gmail
we made it easy to send emails to specific groups of people in gmail. now, we’ll make sure we have a dedicated space in the inbox that regroups all the incoming conversations we have with our newly created list. the process again consists of three steps.
step 1: create a google group
this time yoda needs to access his google groups. once there, the next step is to create a google group for your jedis. there are three screens. On the first screen, it’s important to make sure the group’s email address is easy to remember.
On the second screen, the key configuration point is to have “who can post” set to “anyone on the web” as shown below:
On the third and final screen, we just need to add all the members of the group.
done, the google group is configured and active. now, we need to make it a shared gmail inbox.
step 2: create a shared inbox
To do so, go to https://gmelius.com/download/extension and install the gmelius extension for your browser. Once registered, you will see the addition of gmelius. we want to create a “team inbox” from a google group, so we enter the email address of our newly created group when invited to do so. the steps are detailed below:
gmelius will turn the google group into a shared gmail inbox. The last step in the setup is to invite the same members of your existing google group to the gmelius shared inbox.
step 3: reload gmail
finally, go back to gmail. You’ll see a new section for your group in the navigation bar on the left side of your inbox where you can view, comment, and delegate conversations between your group members.
Interested in learning more about collaborative inboxes in Gmail? check out our page on gmail shared inboxes.