Create Email Group in Gmail: Labels, Groups

How do you create an email group in Gmail?

In a personal Gmail account, an email group is really a contact label in Google Contacts. Gmail has no setting for it, but it reads your Contacts labels when you write a message. Here's the fastest way to create an email group in Gmail for a small team, a club or a project list:

1. 1 Open Google Contacts. Go to contacts.google.com, or click the nine-dot Google apps icon in Gmail's top-right corner and choose Contacts.
2. 2 Add anyone who's missing. Click Create contact and enter at least an email address. A label can only hold saved contacts, not addresses you've just typed somewhere.
3. 3 Select the members. Hover over each contact and tick its checkbox. You can search first to narrow the list.
4. 4 Click the Manage labels icon (the label shape above the list) and choose Create label.
5. 5 Type a name you'll recognise in a To field, such as "Project Alpha team", and click Save. The selected contacts are now on that label.
6. 6 Find the label in the left sidebar under Labels. Click it to see exactly who's on it before you send anything.

Two things trip people up. A contact with no email address can sit on the label but gets no mail. And if a contact has several addresses saved, Gmail may pick one you didn't expect, so open the contact and check which address it holds.

How do you send an email to a Gmail contact group?

1. 1 Click Compose in Gmail.
2. 2 In To, Cc or Bcc, start typing the label name. Gmail suggests the label along with its contacts.
3. 3 Select the label. Gmail expands it into the individual addresses, and you can remove single people before sending.
4. 4 Decide where the addresses go. In To or Cc, every recipient sees every other address. In Bcc they don't, but each person gets the same message.
5. 5 Write and send.

Every expanded address counts as a recipient against your account's daily quota, whether it sits in To, Cc or Bcc. Our article on Gmail sending limits and quota errors explains what happens when a send goes over the limit and Google bounces the rest. A personal account can't get read receipts for group sends either: Gmail read receipts need a Workspace account with an admin who has switched them on.

How do you edit or delete a Gmail contact group?

You make changes in Google Contacts, not in Gmail. To add someone, select the contact, click Manage labels and tick the label. To remove someone, open the label, select the contact and untick the label under Manage labels. Taking a contact off a label doesn't delete the contact.

To delete the whole group, hover over the label in the sidebar and click its delete icon. Google Contacts asks whether to keep the contacts and delete only the label, or delete the contacts too. Pick the first option unless you really want those people gone from your address book. If your contacts sync to your phone, the second option removes them there as well. Renaming works the same way: click the pencil icon next to the label. New messages use the new name, and messages you've already sent don't change.

Contact label or Google Group: which one do you need?

A contact label exists only in your account. Nobody else can send to it, and it has no address of its own. A Google Group, which you create at groups.google.com, does get its own address. Anyone allowed to post can write to that address, and Google sends a copy to every member. On a personal account the address ends in googlegroups.com. In Google Workspace, an admin can create groups on your own domain. Many practitioners have a third option too: a contact list in their own Brevo account, which works differently.

Property	Gmail contact label	Google Group	Brevo contact list
Has its own email address	No	Yes, members receive mail sent to it	No, it's a list you send campaigns to
Who can send to it	Only you, from your account	Whoever the group's posting setting allows	Only you, from Brevo
Recipients see each other	Yes in To/Cc, no in Bcc	Recipients see the group address, not the member list	No, each recipient gets their own copy
Per-recipient content	No, one identical message	No, one message copied to all	Yes, through merge fields
Sending domain	Your Gmail or Workspace address	googlegroups.com, or your domain in Workspace	The domain you authenticate in Brevo
Best fit	Small recurring lists you email personally	Team addresses, support aliases, discussion lists	Campaigns where each person gets a separate message

A common Google Groups problem is that mail from outside senders bounces. That usually means the group's "who can post" setting only allows members or people in your organisation. If customers need to reach the address, change that setting. The member list isn't the problem.

What are the four types of Google Groups?

Classic Google Groups offered four group types: email list, web forum, Q&A forum and collaborative inbox. An email list just forwards messages to members. A web forum lets members read and reply on the web. A Q&A forum adds the option to mark an answer as best. A collaborative inbox lets members assign conversations to each other and mark them resolved. Today's Groups interface treats these as separate settings rather than one choice of type, but the four behaviours are still a useful way to decide what you're building.

What is the difference between a shared mailbox and a Google Group email?

A shared mailbox is one mailbox with its own inbox, and several people open it. In Gmail you set that up through delegation. Each message arrives once, and everyone sees the same thread no matter who handles it. By default, a Google Group address has no shared inbox. It copies each incoming message into every member's own inbox, so three members can answer the same customer without knowing about each other. The collaborative inbox features close that gap by adding assignment and status.

Why doesn't a Gmail group work for cold outreach?

People who build a prospect list often try a contact label first. It breaks in predictable ways:

• Exposed addresses: put a label in To or Cc and every prospect sees every other prospect's address. That can count as disclosing personal data under the GDPR, before anyone has even replied.
• Identical copies: in Bcc, everyone gets the same text, and the To line shows your own address or nothing. Recipients can tell it's a broadcast.
• No per-recipient opt-out: Google's email sender guidelines expect bulk senders to authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC and to offer one-click unsubscribe. A manual Bcc send has no unsubscribe mechanism at all.
• Quota hits: one large group send uses a big share of the daily recipient quota at once. If part of the list bounces, you can't easily tell who actually got the message.
• Replies scatter: there's no thread per prospect to follow up in, so every follow-up becomes another broadcast.

Groups are fine for people who already expect your mail. For first contact with a prospect, each message has to go out on its own, from an authenticated domain. Our guide to DKIM, DMARC and SPF for cold email senders covers the records you need.

How EmailFlow OS sends to a prospect list instead

EmailFlow OS doesn't send one message to a group. It sends a separate message to each person. You record one video and upload it to EmailFlow OS, connect your own Brevo account and sending domain, and import your prospect list into EmailFlow OS. EmailFlow OS then personalises that single recording for each recipient, not just for each company. It sends every version from your own inbox, through your Brevo account and your sending domain, never through a shared platform sender.

Because each prospect gets a separate message, no prospect's address appears in anyone else's email. The sending domain and its reputation stay in your Brevo account, under your control. Inbox placement is still decided by each recipient's mail server, not by EmailFlow OS. The EmailFlow OS personalised video outreach page explains how the setup works.

Related outreach questions

What does a sales follow up email template look like?

A workable sales follow-up template has three parts: one line that points back to your first message, one new piece of information or a question, and one ask that's easy to answer. Send it as a reply in the original thread so the subject and context carry over. Don't send a new message with a fake "Re:" in the subject. Our sales follow up email template collection has copy-ready versions for different situations.

How do you write a follow up sales email to a group?

If the group is made up of prospects, you shouldn't. A follow-up only makes sense in each person's own thread. A Bcc follow-up starts a new, identical message for everyone, including people who've already replied or asked you to stop. Send follow-ups one at a time, and take anyone who replied off the list first.

What decides cold email deliverability?

The receiving server decides. It looks at your domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC results, the domain's reputation, bounce and complaint signals, and sudden changes in your volume. A Gmail contact group doesn't help with any of these, because it only changes how you address the mail. Our article on what decides cold email deliverability goes through each factor.

What is email prospecting?

Email prospecting means finding buyers who fit, checking that their addresses are valid, and making first contact with a message written for that person. That's not the same as emailing a group. The list comes out of your research, and each email goes out on its own. Our prospecting email examples are sorted by trigger.

What is a good email deliverability rate?

The term covers two different numbers. Delivery rate counts the messages a receiving server accepted rather than bounced. Inbox placement counts the accepted messages that the mailbox provider filed in the inbox rather than in spam. A high delivery rate can go with poor inbox placement, so check which one a tool is reporting. Our explainer on email deliverability rate covers how each is measured.

Questions people ask

? Can I have multiple Gmail accounts?

Yes. Each Google account is separate, and you can be signed in to several at once: click your profile picture in Gmail and choose Add another account. Contact labels and Google Groups belong to the account that created them. A group you built in your personal account won't show up when you write from a work account, so you'd have to recreate it there.

? How do I organize thousands of emails in Gmail?

Use filters and labels rather than folders. Create a filter from a search, such as from:client.com or older_than:1y, and set it to apply a label and skip the inbox. Gmail labels work like tags, so unlike a folder, one message can carry several. Archive anything you've finished with. Archived mail stays searchable but is out of your inbox.

? Can I add non-Gmail addresses to a Gmail email group?

Yes. A contact label holds any saved email address, whether it's Outlook, a company domain or anything else. Google Groups also accept outside addresses as members unless a Workspace admin has blocked external members. What matters is the group's settings, not the provider of the member's mailbox.

? Do recipients see that I sent to a group?

With a contact label in To or Cc, recipients see the expanded addresses but not the label name. In Bcc they see neither. With a Google Group, they see the group's address as the recipient, and the email has list headers that mark it as group mail. In all of these cases, everyone gets the same message rather than one written for them.