How do I send email to a group?

Does Windows Live Mail program that came preinstalled on my computer have the ability to send email to a group instead of individually. If so, how do I set it up?
Ann Cowan

There are many ways to send email to a group of people from the Windows Live Mail program. The not-so-easy method involves adding addresses one by one in the Cc or Bcc columns each time you compose a new message; this is detailed in how to send email to multiple recipients.

However, the more elegant approach is to create a group in the Windows Contacts which requires you to invest a fair bit of time populating and organising the Contacts data. But you need to do this only once. Those who already have most, or all, of their contacts information in Windows Contacts are more than half-way through!

Create a group in Windows Contacts

I assume the Windows Contacts application on your computer already has contact information of friends, family, colleagues etc. This is one big lump of disorganised data. What we need to do is to create collections – bunches of contacts based on a specified criterion. This will enable us to send email to a group without having to enter individual addresses. Let us see how to do this in Windows Live Mail.

1. Start Windows Live Mail on your computer and click “Go” -> “Contacts“. Don’t see the menu bar at the top, please refer how to get Windows Live Mail toolbar for details – [Slide 1].
2. The list of your contacts should now be on the screen – assuming you have a few. Else you need to first populate Windows Contacts with the details (name, email and postal addresses etc.) of the people you correspond with and then come back to this page – [Slide 2].
3. To send an email to a group, you have to bunch them up. Windows Contacts allows you to do just that through the use of Categories. Click “File” -> “Add a category” – [Slide 3].
4. A small pop-up opens up. Provide a name for the Windows Contacts category. This can be anything you want… preferably, a descriptive name – [Slide 4].
5. Now click on the contacts from the list below to add them to this category. If you accidentally add a wrong contact, you can remove it by clicking on it again – [Slide 5].
6. Once satisfied, hit the “Save” button. Great! A Windows Contacts category is made – [Slide 6].
7. The new category you’ve created will be listed in the left pane – [Slide 7].
8. To send an email to this group (all the people in the category you had created), open a new message window and type in the category name in the “To:” field – [Slide 8].
9. The category name appears prefixed by a plus sign. Compose the email as you normally do and send it to everyone in the group – [Slide 9].

You can have as many groups as you want in Windows Contacts and, yes, the same individual can be a member of multiple groups. Thus, someone who sits in the next cabin in your office can belong to both “Colleagues” and “Friends” groups.

On 16th November 2010, Jerry wrote: “Sending to group on Live Mail (Windows 7) does not work for more than 20 individual addresses“.
I don’t think that’s true but may be wrong. As long as it’s a reasonable figure, I think the number of people you can send a group email at one time depends on the service. For instance, a new Hotmail subscriber can only send a message to 10 people; read Hotmail email limit for more.