Dave asks: “How do I group contacts in Gmail?”

One of our readers Dave (aka Nikon-Man) asked a question over on StumbleUpon that I thought would be best answered here so others can read it too. He said -

Hi there GoogleTutor, at last I have a question for you!! I want to group together a few names + e-mail addresses on my G-mail , how do I do this?

That’s a great question Dave, and a situation which I am well able to answer as I use this feature on a daily basis. As someone who has to juggle multiple business clients as well as manage a writing staff, Gmail’s “groups” is a God-send. Using groups, I can compile private mailing lists and organise my contacts into categories to find them easier. Plus now that Gmail has vastly improved their contacts book, it is easier than ever to set up an email group within Gmail and manage it effectively.

Here’s how to set things up. It’s easier than you think!

First, go to your contacts book in Gmail. When it loads, look in the top left hand corner. You’ll see these two buttons :

You need to click the second button (the one I have highlighted in yellow). This is the “create a group” button.

A box will pop up and you’ll be asked to name your group. Give it the name you want. I have set one up called “test”. When you click “save”, you will now see the new group in the list along with your other groups :

Now that the group has been set up, you now need to add the relevant contacts to the group. Just go to “All Contacts” and scroll through the list of contacts that you have. Tick the boxes next to the contacts that you want to add to your new group. When you have them all ticked, you’ll see a drop box at the top of the right hand pane called “Groups” :

Choose the group name you want to add the contacts to and the contacts you have chosen will automatically be added there.

If you ever want to remove someone from a group, just go to that person’s profile in your contacts book, drop down that same menu and choose “Remove from….”. They will then be removed from the group (but not from your Gmail contacts book). Easy.

The uses for such a group are endless – you can set up an email group for all your Digg contacts or your Stumbleupon contacts. Do you have a work assignment that involves you communicating with a lot of people in one company? Well then set up a category to group them all together! Or set up groups to organise your work colleagues into their various departments. Make a “family” group for personal emails, a “Book Club” group to send out book-related emails to all the members….the possibilities are endless!

When you want to send out an email to your whole group, just type the name of the group in the email address field. Gmail will then automatically add all the email addresses in that group into the email window.

I hope that answers your question Dave, and if anyone else has any Google-related questions they would like us to answer, just send them on in.