It’s simple to send a mass, customized email to all of the email addresses in your Gmail account using Gmail and my Gmail extension GMass. Simply fill in the To box with all of the email addresses, write your Subject and Message, then click the GMass button (instead of the Gmail Send button). I’ll show you three alternative ways to open the Compose window with all of your email accounts in this post. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
1. Click the “Build Email List” button in GMass.
Using the Search box at the top of Gmail, you may search your chats. Once you’ve compiled a list of discussions that match, click the GMass Build Email List button (the magnifying glass) to extract all of the email addresses included within those chats. All of the email addresses in the From and To lines of those matching email messages will be found.
For example, if I wanted to send a mass email to everyone with whom I’ve had a discussion about “iPhone,” I could use my Gmail account to search for “iPhone” and then use the GMass Build Email List option to generate a list of all those email addresses.
So, if I want to find something that matches almost every email message in my account, all I have to do is search for a short term like “the.” The Build Email List button will now build an email list of nearly every single email address in your account, assuming that almost every email will include the word “the.” It’s worth noting that this method will extract all addresses from each matched messages To Line. If you’re part of a group email for 20 individuals, it will also retrieve the other 19 addresses, which may or may not be people you know. A Gmail Compose window will appear with all of the addresses in the To line after the email list has been created. Then just write a Subject and Message, customize as required, and click the GMass button to send tailored emails to each address individually.
Pros: It’s simple to perform, doesn’t need any exporting or importing, and can be done entirely via the Gmail interface.
Cons: It’s possible that you won’t discover every email address in your account, and that you’ll find some addresses for individuals with whom you’ve never had direct communication. You may only search through 5,000 messages at a time.
2. Select all of your contacts in Google Contacts, then click the Email icon.
If you keep track of your contacts in Google Contacts, you can use the Google Contacts Interface to pick all or part of them, then click the Email button to open a Gmail Compose window with all of those addresses in the To line.
To begin, go to the upper-left menu in Gmail and choose Contacts:
Then go to the Contacts list, use the checkbox tool to select all of them, and click the Email button. It’s worth noting that it’ll just pick the contacts on the current page; you’ll have to navigate to the next page of contacts to select them individually. As a result, this approach is restricted by the fact that it only allows you to choose 250 contacts at a time.
When utilizing Google Contacts, there are a few things to keep in mind:
You may use Gmail to start Contacts, which will nest the Google Contacts interface inside Gmail. This is the preferable approach, which I’ll explain in a moment.
You may also open Google Contacts in a new browser window by navigating to https://www.google.com/contacts in a new browser window. This is the least desirable option.
Google Contacts features a new “preview” version that has been available for a while, but many people prefer the old Google Contacts interface. Because the traditional UI is much more helpful, we’ll use it for this example of sending a bulk email to all of the email addresses in your Gmail account. I’ll explain why soon.
To send individual customized emails to each recipient, click the GMass button instead of the Send button after writing your email message.
Why shouldn’t you use Google Contacts if you’re not using Gmail?
If you go to https://www.google.com/contacts/ directly in the browser instead of accessing your Contacts from inside Gmail as mentioned above, the Email button will stop working when you have too many contacts selected.
If you select too many contacts and then click the Email button, the following error will appear:
Pros: Simple to use, and Google Contacts are often split down into logical groups of individuals, allowing you to send bulk emails to specific groups of people.
Cons: Selecting too many contacts at once may result in a “Bad Request” error instead of the Gmail Compose window opening. You can’t choose Contacts across several pages, and each page only shows 250 contacts.
3. Using Google Docs, export the email addresses from Google Contacts.
Finally, you can simply export all of your Google Contacts as a CSV file, import the CSV file into Google Sheets, and then use GMass to extract the email addresses from your Google Sheets spreadsheet. Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as it seems.
1. To begin, export all or part of your contacts to a CSV file in Google Contacts.
2. Select Export and then the Contacts you’d want to export. I’ll extract all 25,005 contacts in my case:
3. Then, into a Google Sheets spreadsheet, paste the CSV file.
4. After you’ve finished creating your spreadsheet, you should tidy it up by removing any unnecessary columns. If you don’t, your spreadsheet may contain too much data for GMass to handle. As a result, just remove all of the empty columns.
5. Then connect to the spreadsheet using GMass. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial to linking GMass to your Google Sheets spreadsheet if you’ve never used it before.
Finally, a Compose window will appear, containing all of the email addresses included in the To line. GMass will combine your addresses into a “alias” address if you have more than 1,000, as seen in the image below. This alias address is a one-size-fits-all solution for all 24,997 addresses.
GMass may conceal the Gmail Send button in certain circumstances, as seen in the above image, to protect you from inadvertently pressing it and making a big mistake. Using the GMass button will send each contact a tracked, customized email, while using the Gmail Send button would send a single email to all of your contacts, exposing everyone in the To line to each other.
Pros: You may be certain that you’ll get every single email address associated with a Google Contact.
Cons: Not everyone you’ve written or received email from is likely to be a Google Contact. It takes the greatest work, but it’s still quite simple.
Avoid using Google Contacts’ new “preview” version.
1. It’s attractive, but it loses all of the essential features of the original.
2. It is not possible to export.
3 . You are unable to choose your Other Contacts folder, which contains the majority of your email addresses.
4. There is no Email icon that can be used to open a Compose window with the chosen Contacts already entered in the To box.
Final Words
It irritates a lot of people. The Google Contacts “preview” version is the ugly and apparently forgotten step-child of the original Google Contacts. Keep your distance.
