[Hidden-tech] Is there a way to set up address books and easily mail to them in GMail?

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 22 Apr 2015 08:42:13 -0400 Shel Horowitz <shel at principledprofit.com> wrote:

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> Until a few months ago, I frequently sent out eblasts to groups of people:
> humor, progressive politics, western Mass events. Then I was forced to stop
> using Eudora.
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> These days, I'm primarily using GMail but I haven't found a way to e.g.,
> mail something to my Western MA list. I've set a couple of the lists up in
> Outlook, but I really hate using Outlook because anything in the inbox
> becomes an individual document that shows up when I search for documents in
> the Finder (vastly decreasing the utility of search), because it generates
> constant annoying error messages, and because it needs me to re-enter my
> password frequently. So I am only loading the program when I absolutely
> have to send a bulk mail, but then each time, another 500 emails become
> searchable in the Finder.
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> Surely there must be a way to set up address books in GMail.
> Anyone know it?

I'm going to suggest something different: a server-based mailing list 
(typically using a program like Mailman), rather than a mailing list on your 
'local disk' (or in this case in your *private* (?) space on google as part of 
your GMail account -- in this instance it is functionally equivalent).

There are several important advantages here:

1) [Probably the most important one] list serve software (like Mailman) allow 
the members of the list to unsubscribe to the posts, on their own without any 
effort on your part.  (You can also set it up so new people can subscribe on 
their own.)

2) Only *1* copy of the post is stored in your local mail folders (eg in your 
Sent folder).  There is (optionaly) ALSO a copy on the list server in the 
archives (which can be public or private).

3) List serve programs like Mailman will be E-Mail bandwidth 'friendly' and 
will send the 'blast' to a limited number of receipents at a time and handle 
all of the scheduling and queing automagically.  Also *you* are only sending 
*1* message to the list serve address and the list serve program takes care of 
delivering messages and will deal with broken e-mail message (bounces).

I don't know if Google provides a generic E-Mail list serve service. Yahoo
does [YahooGroups] (but I would NOT recomend Yahoo). There are other providers
free or otherwise (Deepwoods Software is a low-cost provider: $2.50/month per
list). While most of the time these E-Mail list serves are 'bi-directional'
(all subscribers can post), it is possible to set up an E-Mail list serve to
only let selected persons to post (usually the owner, but the owner can
delegate posting rights as he/she sees fit).

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