Creating Outlook Distribution Groups

If you find you often need to send an email to a group of people, for example a team you are a part of, then an Outlook mail group might be the solution for you. That does of course assume that you are using the Outlook desktop app! This guide is designed for the Windows version of Outlook (2019), however may work on the Mac version too.

This guide will walk you through the steps of how to set this up. If you use Microsoft 365 in your environment, this solution will avoid the need to set up contacts and distribution groups if your recipients are outside your organisation. It is also worth noting that your groups are stored locally on your computer, and not backed up to the cloud.

Creating a Mail Group

1. Navigate to your contacts by clicking on the icon showing two people in the bottom left corner of your Outlook window. This is the third icon from left.
   
2. Select ‘New Contact Group‘ from the top toolbar.
   
3. On the new window that Outlook will launch select ‘Add Members‘ and then ‘New E-mail Contact‘. If you already have contacts set up for those you want to add to the group, you can select ‘From Address Book‘.
   
4. Enter the ‘Display name‘ and ‘E-mail address‘ of the recipient(s). When you’ve entered their details select ‘OK‘.
   
5. As you begin to add members to your group, you will see that they appear in the Outlook window as shown in the example screenshot below. If you need to remove any members from the group, you can also do that here.
   
6. Don’t forget to give your delivery group a name in the ‘Name‘ field.
   
7. Once you are happy that you’ve created your group (or edited it), then click on ‘Save & Close‘.
   
8. When composing your email in Outlook, simply type in the name of your delivery group and you should see it in the suggestions list. As you can see in this example screenshot, our group ‘The Example Family‘ has been successfully added. If we click on the ‘+‘ icon to the left of the group name, this will expand out and show us all of the members. This action is irreversible, so if you expand a group you will not then be able to close it again.