Create a mailing list In Yahoo Mail, type your Contacts list name in the 'To' field

In the age of Whatsapp and Snapchat, emails might be seen as a ponderous form of correspondence, but it comes into its own if you’re running a club or society. While social media and group text-messaging are widely used by many clubs, there’s a danger that these communal posts and texts will go unnoticed. Meanwhile, unread emails sit in our inbox – all bolded up – demanding to be read.

But what's the easiest way to send one single email to multiple club or society members in one go? Then send another email to the very same people a week or so later? You create a mailing list. All email services (programs and websites) offer this ability, though the process will differ.

But why use a mailing list?

Well, it means you don't have to remember every single member of your group every single time you despatch an email to your group. And, therefore, you're not going to miss anyone off your email (unless you forgot to add them to your original mailing list).

What's more, whenever someone replies to your email all group members will receive that reply. This is much better than simply adding multiple contacts to an email, which means that when a recipient hits reply (usually the default setting) it will only go to the sender, keeping everyone else out of the loop. After you’ve set up your mailing list, it’s very easy to add or remove people as your membership changes.

You can even create separate mailing lists for different groups within the organisation. For example, you can create one for people who run your club, another for members, and another for potential members you want to keep informed of your club’s plans, special offers, events and so on.

Creating mailing lists in Yahoo and Gmail

In the Mini Workshop below, we’ll show you how to create a mailing list in Microsoft Outlook. However, all email services offer this feature – even if they have different names for it and use different methods.

Yahoo refers to this as a ‘contacts list’ ( www.snipca.com/28764), whereby you group your contacts into a list, then type the list name in the ‘To’ field of your email (see screenshot above). Similarly, Gmail calls it ‘grouping contacts’. Once you've done this, you can send emails to those contacts simply by typing the group name ( www.snipca.com/28765).

What about other email programs?

The feature is available in email clients like Thunderbird and em Client that let you manage all your email accounts from one program. The instructions are fairly straightforward for Thunderbird (see www.snipca.com/28566), and for em Client, follow the steps on how to set up a distribution list in the bottom half of this page: www.snipca.com/28767.