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Creating A Group Contact List In Microsoft Outlook For Mac

2017-4-18  Today, we’re pleased to announce Groups is now rolling out to Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android. Groups is already available in Outlook for Windows and on the web—so now you can access your group conversations and content no matter which platform you use. With these updates, you can: View your group list. Read and reply to group conversations.

I’ve received a message with a lot of people in the To and CC field. As we’re all going to work on the same project, I want to create a Distribution List containing these people.

Nov 29, 2019 Drag and drop individual contact names in the list of names in the center column onto the new group you formed in the Group column. If more than one email address is listed for a given contact, macOS Mail uses the most recently used address when you send a message to the list. Oct 29, 2013 Creating Contact Groups in Outlook on a Mac Krista Eason. Outlook 2013: Creating a Contact Group. How to create a contact group in Microsoft Outlook 2016? Creating Contact Group for Outlook for MAC 2011 I have a list of 150 or so email address, all separated by semi-colon Can I create a bcc contact group in Outlook 2011 for Mac without typing each address in to create separate contacts? Create a distribution list: Outlook 2011 for Mac. If you often send messages to the same group of people, it may be beneficial to create a group that can be used as a distribution list. Open Outlook 2011. At the bottom of the navigation pane, click Contacts. On the Home tab, click Contact Group.

Is there an easy way I can create a Distribution List directly from the message or do I have to manually add everybody (I hope not…)?

Creating A Group Contact List In Microsoft Outlook For Mac 2020

You can create a Contact Group (as Distribution Lists are called in Outlook 2010 and later) directly from the recipient list of the message but depending on your Outlook version and settings, you might need to take some additional steps.

Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and Office 365

Creating a Contact Group from the recipient list of a message goes quite quickly in Outlook 2010 and later;

  1. Right click on a recipient in the message header in the Reading Pane.
  2. From the context menu that pops-up, choose; Select All
  3. Now that all the recipients are highlighted, press CTRL+C to copy them or right click on the selected addresses and choose Copy.
  4. Open your Contact Group or create a new one via;
    New Items-> More Items-> Contact Group
    (or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+L)
  5. Press the “Add Members” button and select “From Address Book”.
  6. Place your cursor in the field next to the “Members->” button.
  7. Press CTRL+V to paste the copied addresses.
  8. Press OK and the addresses will be added to the Contact Group.

You can repeat the steps above if multiple addresses have been added to both the To and CC fields.


Via the right click menu, you can easily select and copy all recipient addresses from a message. (click on image to enlarge)

Outlook 2007

The above trick will not work in Outlook 2007 as the copy command there will only copy the listed names and not the actual underlying email addresses. Unless all these addresses have been added to an Address List in your Address Book already (like the Global Address List of an Exchange account), this will result in unresolved names.

You can still achieve the same via a slight detour;

  1. Right click on the message in the message list and choose “Message Options…”.
  2. In the “Internet headers” box at the bottom, scroll down until you see the list of email addresses for the To or CC field.
  3. Select all the names and addresses but make sure you do not select the “To:” or “CC:” text itself (don’t worry about any extra spaces though).
  4. Press CTRL+C to copy them.
  5. Open your Distribution List or create a new one via;
    File-> New-> Distribution List
    (or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+L)
  6. Press the “Select Members…” button.
  7. Place your cursor in the field next to the “Members->” button.
  8. Press CTRL+V to paste the copied addresses.
  9. Press OK and the addresses will be added to the Contact Group.

Creating A Group Contact List In Microsoft Outlook For Mac Support

Note: If you get an error when pressing OK and Outlook complains about not being able to resolve a contact, the issue is most likely caused by your system not allowing the comma ( , ) as a separator character. Microsoft windows vs mac os vs linux vs unix. You can enable this option via;
Tools-> Options…-> button E-mail Options…-> button Advanced E-mail Options…-> option: Allow comma as address separator

Creating A Group Contact List In Microsoft Outlook For Mac 2017


In Outlook 2007, carefully select the addresses from the Message Options dialog.