Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Sending Group Emails via iPhone Mail App - MailShot is the Answer

Have you ever wanted to email a group of people from your Contact Address Book to send a message via your iPhone?    There doesn't seem to be a way to actually do this using the Mail app on the iPhone.

Normally these contact groups are created in the Mail application on your Mac computer.  If you try to select this group in the Mail app, it merely brings up the list of all the members in that Group and you have to select them one at a time in order to add them to the To: field.   This is not efficient, if you have a large group of contacts that are contained in that Group.

Today I found an app MailShot by Soluble Apps, that has a easy-to-use interface that allows the user to create Groups that will be added to your Contact Address Book in effect as a new contact which contains the emails needed to send all at once when using the Mail app. 

It was easy for me to create a Family Group using MailShot using the following steps: (1) Created a new Group (2) Selected contacts for that Group (3) Updated to my Address Book automatically.    It showed up in my regular iPhone Contact Address Book list and I could email all the members of the family without having to select them individually.


When I was ready to send an email to this new group, I opened my Mail app on iPhone and selected "Family Group" and was able to send an email to all the members of that group at once.  You can also place the selected Group into a forward, cc or bc fields.   You can send photos, documents and other attachments with this group email.   You also have the ability to deselect/select to manage the groups using the MailShot app.


The MailShot FREE app on iTunes allows you to create 3 groups with 5 persons per group; while the updated paid version allows creation of 50 groups with 50 persons per group.  There is also an iPad version.

This app is worth checking out for large email management.  So if you have a large group of contacts like 250 members that you need to email from your iPhone, you could create 5 groups of 50 each and then select each group1, group2, group3, group4 and group5 and send the email in a very efficient manner.

2 comments:

Peter Johnson said...

Thanks for the review.

Just to mention that the next update will allow groups larger than 50 (when the app is upgraded), it is due for release in around 2 weeks time.

Cheers
Peter Johnson
Soluble Apps

Granny Joan said...

Thanks Peter for keeping us informed about the upcoming update.