Outlook is a steaming pile of crap

[Alan]

Imagine you become president of your strata council and get an email
containing all the addressses of the strata members, and want to create
a distribution group from those addresses cc'ed.

Tell me how you do it.

Go ahead... ...I'll wait.

[-hh]

Post by Alan
Imagine you become president of your strata council and get an email
containing all the addressses of the strata members, and want to create
a distribution group from those addresses cc'ed.
Tell me how you do it.
Go ahead... ...I'll wait.

IIRC, that's a lot of drag & drop, of each address. With MS trying to be "helpful"
of course.

Often what can happen is that when Groups aren't readily available to individuals
is that they'll klunge one manually by putting everyone into the "TO" list on an email
and then use that to do "Reply All" blasts. The fun there is that there's always
people coming & going which makes the maintenance impossible, plus there's
accidental drops. Pretty much only works one-way for a team lead maintaining
their own list & doing all of the sending.

Sound about right?

-hh

[Alan]

Post by -hh

Post by Alan
Imagine you become president of your strata council and get an email
containing all the addressses of the strata members, and want to create
a distribution group from those addresses cc'ed.
Tell me how you do it.
Go ahead... ...I'll wait.

IIRC, that's a lot of drag & drop, of each address. With MS trying to be "helpful"
of course.

I tried drag & drop in pretty much every way I could think.

Post by -hh
Often what can happen is that when Groups aren't readily available to individuals
is that they'll klunge one manually by putting everyone into the "TO" list on an email
and then use that to do "Reply All" blasts. The fun there is that there's always
people coming & going which makes the maintenance impossible, plus there's
accidental drops. Pretty much only works one-way for a team lead maintaining
their own list & doing all of the sending.
Sound about right?

Kind of. This was for my brother, who is now on his strata council.

There's no central location for this distribution list / contact group
to be located, so he was creating it in his own Contacts folder and
wanted to send it out to other members of the strata (with all the
maintenance terrors that will create).

What we ("he" to be fair) eventually discovered was what is an extremely
poorly-documented feature of what Outlook now calls a "Contact Group":

When you are creating it, in addition to adding members from your
existing contacts, you can simply paste the semi-colon delimited list
you get by copying people in the from:, to:, cc:, or bcc: fields of an
email, and add those to what should really be described as a
"distribution list"... ...because email addresses added this way do not
become individual contacts within your Contacts folder in Outlook.

<https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-contact-group-or-distribution-list-in-outlook-for-pc-88ff6c60-0a1d-4b54-8c9d-9e1a71bc3023>

I did eventually find the documentation, but the instructions are
obscured by not matching what you're trying to achieve. You have to
select, "Add Members > From Outlook Contacts" when that isn't what
you're trying to do.

[Thomas E.]

Post by Alan

Post by Alan
Imagine you become president of your strata council and get an email
containing all the addressses of the strata members, and want to create
a distribution group from those addresses cc'ed.
Tell me how you do it.
Go ahead... ...I'll wait.

IIRC, that's a lot of drag & drop, of each address. With MS trying to be "helpful"
of course.

I tried drag & drop in pretty much every way I could think.

Often what can happen is that when Groups aren't readily available to individuals
is that they'll klunge one manually by putting everyone into the "TO" list on an email
and then use that to do "Reply All" blasts. The fun there is that there's always
people coming & going which makes the maintenance impossible, plus there's
accidental drops. Pretty much only works one-way for a team lead maintaining
their own list & doing all of the sending.
Sound about right?

Kind of. This was for my brother, who is now on his strata council.
There's no central location for this distribution list / contact group
to be located, so he was creating it in his own Contacts folder and
wanted to send it out to other members of the strata (with all the
maintenance terrors that will create).
What we ("he" to be fair) eventually discovered was what is an extremely
When you are creating it, in addition to adding members from your
existing contacts, you can simply paste the semi-colon delimited list
you get by copying people in the from:, to:, cc:, or bcc: fields of an
email, and add those to what should really be described as a
"distribution list"... ...because email addresses added this way do not
become individual contacts within your Contacts folder in Outlook.
<https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-contact-group-or-distribution-list-in-outlook-for-pc-88ff6c60-0a1d-4b54-8c9d-9e1a71bc3023>
I did eventually find the documentation, but the instructions are
obscured by not matching what you're trying to achieve. You have to
select, "Add Members > From Outlook Contacts" when that isn't what
you're trying to do.

Life sans Outlook is pretty good. Now if I could just delete the app and be done. Alas, Microsoft 365 seems to be a take-all-or-nothing proposition now.