I received a question from a reader today asking me how to set up a distribution list like he had on his Windows machine with Outlook. My response to his was this:

1. Make sure that you have an Address card in Address Book for each of the people you want on the list.
2. Create a New Group by selecting the “+” button under the Group area.
3. Name the Group like you did in Outlook.
4. From your Address Book entries Drag and Drop the names of the people you want in the Group to the group name.
5. Now open up Mail and in the “TO:” Field type the name of the Group you created.
6. Type your e-mail and Press Send.

I hope this helps him and you out.

• Keeping More Than One Address Book
• Address Book integration in Mail!
• Has Anyone Ever Asked You To Resend an E-mail
• Why Do I Get Winmail.dat Attachments In Mail?
• Add Notes And To-Do’s To Your E-mail

I was surprised to find a great many effect filters available when setting photos in Leopard’s Address Book — six pages of them! Included are hologram, ASCII art(!), and other great ones. To check them out, just load up Address Book, edit the image in one of your contacts, and click the swirly effects button next to the camera button.

Via Mac OSX hints

• 12 Tips for Mac OS X Address Book
• Add New Contact To a Specific Group on iPhone
• Address Book integration in Mail!
• 10 Things You May Not Have Thought Of To Use Your Mac For.
• Use iWeb To Share Your Family Photos

For all of you who use your iPods to get you address book contacts here is a way to get the smart groups on them.

I got my iPod touch last week, and I realized that, even if it can sync my contacts and groups correctly from Address Book, it cannot sync smart groups. While it is possible to manually copy contacts from a smart group to a standard group, that is boring.

So, I decided to get myself to AppleScript, and built a little script that will help. For the script to work, it is simple: create your smart group and call it, let’s say, SMyGroup (The “S” before meaning smart; otherwise name the group as you want). Built the smart group conditions to make it work the way you need. Then create a standard group called MyGroup. So you have two groups with similar names, with only a “S” in difference. That is necessary because I couldn’t figure out how to distinguish smart from standard groups in Address Book via script. Then use this script:

tell application “Address Book”
repeat with the_person in every person in group “SMyGroup”
add the_person to group “SMyGroup”
end repeat
save addressbook
quit
end tell

Repeat those steps for each smart group to be put into a standard group, and in the AppleScript, just add more repeat loops. Execute it in AppleScript Editor, and your smart and standard groups will be identical, and will sync correctly to your iPhone or touch.

As a bonus hint, you can automate this in Automator. Open the application, and put an Automator » Run AppleScript action into the workflow area, and paste the above code there. Then save it as an iCal module and set it to execute, say, every day at 8:00 repetitively. Then, if you make a change on your computer or iPhone or Touch, you’ll always have a fresh copy the of changes in all of them. Cool!

Technorati Tags: Address Book, Smart Groups

• Add New Contact To a Specific Group on iPhone
• Keeping More Than One Address Book
• 12 Tips for Mac OS X Address Book
• Sync iPhone Contacts And Calendars Without iTunes
• Reader Question: How Do I Make A Distribution List in Mail?

One of the things that is much less integrated in Mail compared to Outlook is the Address Book. Outlook combines all the calendar, addresses and mail in one application. When you compare the whole experience of Mail to iLife, the integration is not really good. What you can do to improve it though is to add a “Add Address” button in Mail’s toolbar. You’ll then only have to click on the email that is from the sender you want to add the email address to your address book and click “Add Address”. What is unfortunate is that you won’t really get confirmation that it’s actually done. You really have to open up address book to see that it is now there. To add the “Add Address” button to your toolbar:

1. Right-click anywhere on the toolbar and choose “Customize Toolbar”.
2. Drag the “Add Address” icon to the toolbar.
3. Click “Done”.

• Organizing threads in Mail!
• Reader Question: How Do I Make A Distribution List in Mail?
• Color labels in Mail
• Apply image filters to Address Book photos
• How-to Email an iTunes Song

The Mac OS X Address Book has loads of features that are often overlooked by most users. Here are a few tips to save you time and let you make the most of Address Book. Includes how to share your contacts, search for attachments they sent you, merge duplicate entries, and automatically put contacts’ sites in your Safari Bookmarks Bar.

read more | digg story

• Keeping More Than One Address Book
• Save time in Safari
• Manually Add Websites To Safari 4 Beta’s Top Sites Page
• Apply image filters to Address Book photos
• One way to sync Address Book smart groups to iPods etc.