Filed under: Software, Productivity, Tips and tricks, Internet Tools
Set preferred addresses for Address Book groups
Dan Moren at MacUser just removed a long-standing headache of mine and I'm sure many others by posting on the ability to specify default addresses for Address Book groups. Here's a little background if you're scratching your head: in Mail.app, you can type the name of a group to address a message to every member of that group. The catch is that if any of those members have more than one email addresses in their card, Mail.app arbitrarily chooses which address gets used when that member added as part of a group. This can cause all sorts of problems, ranging from minor annoyances all the way up to sending a NSFW (Not Safe For Work) forward to exactly the wrong address.Enter the wonders of being able to set a default address for these members in groups. This removes the worry from using the power of groups to address your messages. All you need to do is select Edit > Edit Distribution List... (not the greatest name for this feature, IMHO) to access a panel which allows you to chose default addresses for all the members of your groups. What's even better is that this panel allows you to simply specify one label or another (Work, Home, etc.) for all the members in that group, instead of forcing you to manually chose labels for each member, one by one. Nice.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
systemsboy said 8:37PM on 12-11-2006
Wow! Super cool!
-systemsboy
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Yoram said 3:05AM on 12-12-2006
It is very unfortunate that this tip only works when sending to a group. There is no way to set a deafult address for sending an email to individual contacts. In fact, the mail address top of the list in Mail seems arbitrary to me. I have tried to influence this, but with no success to date.
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Ainsophaur said 4:13AM on 12-12-2006
Also, try setting your distribution list on your laptop and then sync it with .Mac to your desktop. It gets screwed up. I send out regular mails to several large groups, and I have to check the distribution list every time to be sure that it goes out to the right email address. This frustration and Apple's failure to address this problem with .Mac syncing for a couple years now has forced me to buy a Buik emailing program.
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Zach Everson said 7:43AM on 12-12-2006
Great find! I use a group list to stay in touch with some friends from high school. Just a few weeks ago I realized my e-mails were going to one friend's wife, whose e-mail address I had stored in his address card.
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dbriansmith said 8:29AM on 12-13-2006
If you want to use this feature with smart groups, you have to select a regular group and then edit> edit distribution group, and then you can see your smart groups. If you're like me and you don't use any regular groups, only smart groups, you must create a regular group.
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Robert Stainsby said 4:51AM on 12-18-2006
My "Set Primary Addresses" Address Book plug-ins, available free from http://web.mac.com/rjsdev , might also be of help here. They provide a user interface to examine and change the "primary" tag that Apple uses in the internal Address Book database.
It seems that the address used for a group is not actually chosen arbitrarily. Some of my users have reported that the address marked as primary is used by default, and my own (limited) testing seems to confirm this. So the plug-ins could save you from setting the address separately for each group. Like the "Edit Distribution List..." menu item, the plug-ins work for phone numbers and street addresses as well as email.
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