If you use your email account often, you'll frequently send emails to the same contacts — whether it's keeping up with meeting agendas for a specific group or looping family members in on the latest happenings. While you can manually add recipients as relevant every time that you want to send a group email, it can be a long, tedious job. Fortunately, Microsoft Outlook has a more efficient way of completing the task.

The ability to create a contact list is a useful feature that allows you to group selected contacts together — this way, Outlook can easily email everyone included in the specified list. It also helps protect the privacy of your recipients, since the group name will be shown instead of individual email addresses. Since Microsoft's email app is often used for work purposes, having a contact list like this could save you the effort of trying to make sure the right email is sent to the relevant contacts without fail, and will streamline your workflow. If this sounds like the perfect time-saver, this guide breaks down how you can create a contact list in a few easy steps.

How to create an email group in classic Microsoft Outlook

Creating a contact list (AKA group) can save you the hassle of sending emails individually to multiple contacts. Here's how to set one up once, so that you don't have to try to remember all the necessary contacts or go searching for email addresses every time you want to send a bulk message.

1. On the navigation bar (found at Outlook's bottom-left), click on the People option. This will take you to the Contacts section of Outlook.
2. In the Ribbon bar, navigate to the Home tab and click on New Contact Group.
3. A new window will open. Click on Add Members, then select From Address Book if that is your source.
4. In another window, all your contacts will appear. To select multiple contacts, hold Control while clicking each contact with your mouse.
5. When you're done, click Members then OK to add the contacts to the group. Enter a name for your newly formed contact list in the Name box, then click Save and Close.

How to create a contact list in the new Microsoft Outlook

If you've decided to upgrade to the new and improved Microsoft Outlook, the process of creating a new contact group, now called a contact list, is slightly different.

1. To the left of the app, click on the People icon.
2. On this new screen, you'll see a New contact box towards the top of the app. Press the arrow button next to it, then New contact list.
3. Here, you can create your new contact list. Give it a name and add the relevant contacts. Once you're done, press the Create button.
4. If done correctly, you'll have a new contact list which you can use when you need to email the group!

How to email your contact list when sending a new message

Now that you've created your group of related contacts, here's how to send an email to the entire list in one swift motion.

1. In the Home tab, click on New Email, then click the To box.
2. Your contacts will appear, including your newly-created contact group name as an option. Click on it, then on To, followed by OK.
3. Your contact group name will now be in the To box, ready for you to compose and send your email to the list of contacts included in the group.

Microsoft contact list vs. group

In the past, an email contact list used to be called a "contact group," as shown in the Classic Outlook steps. The classic term "contact group" is equivalent to "contact list" in the new Outlook.

However, to make things interesting, Microsoft has recently repurposed the word "group," so you'll still see the term lingering around. It just means something different now. "Outlook.com groups" functionality available in the new app stretches beyond sending messages to also sharing files, scheduling events on a group calendar, and more. That is not the scope of this article. Here we have shown you how to create a list of contacts for the sake of easily emailing a group of people, which is now called a "contact list."

What else can you do with Outlook?

Microsoft Outlook is a powerful email app that's ranked among the best email apps for Android, but many of the features found on the classic version of the app are hidden behind the Ribbon interface, introduced in 2002 with the Microsoft Office 2003 suite. This redesigned navigation bar was meant to simplify the burden of finding features. However, over the past 20 years, it's become bloated with countless tabs and options that hide other features. Fortunately, our helpful guide below can give you some pointers on how to master Outlook for your job, saving you the hassle of searching through the Ribbon toolbar for the right feature.