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Contact Groups
Idea shared by Joe Davis - 11/10/2014 at 8:12 AM
Proposed
I understand that SmarterMail has its "Aliases" feature and that is seen as a replacement for Outlook's "Contact Groups" but I find it a weak replacement for a couple of reasons.
  1. Regular users are not able to create their own aliases as they must ask a domain administrator to do it. In office environments, users have been creating local contact groups themselves for a couple of decades. Asking a domain admin to create something like this for them only makes things difficult for the end user and the domain admins.
  2. Alias != Contact Group because an Alias is an email address with a N number of real addresses behind it. Contact groups are just a way to organize multiple existing contacts for someone within their own email client (Outlook or whatever).
Currently, we are able to create Contact Groups by adding an extra Outlook Data File to Outlook and creating the group in the contacts of that data file. While this works, it is confusing for users because they now have two different "Contacts" listed in Outlook. We've done our best to train our clients to not create anything other than contact groups in this second area but it's easy to get confused. Also, for those who use smart phones or tablets along with Outlook, they don't see their contact groups as they don't sync. This is frustrating for users.
d
see this thread: http://portal.smartertools.com/community/a182/outlook-contact-groups-do-not-sync-with-eas.aspx
N
User cannot create contact groups to email to multiple contacts - Category feature will not let you tag a group of contacts to be included in the category. Very frustrating for users to send emails to multiple contacts.
N
It would be GREAT even if the user could tag multiple contacts and put them in the same category. As SM is now the user has to select individual contacts and select which category to associate them with.

This would work as groups since the user could select which category to filter by and the contact group would list and then be selected to send an email.
Outside of syncing with outlook, why are users not able to create their own contact groups. This is really an inconvenience for me as the domain administrator to create domain aliases for 250 users, not to mention the amount of aliases we now have in the global address list.
 
Can someone please explain why this feature is not available as this is a must for any email program, and pretty basic.

Jason Earle

IT Systems Administrator
JCL Investments Inc. | https://www.jclinc.ca
Most larger ISPs that provide e-mail services now block bulk messages sent via contact groups.

G-Mail limits to no more than 50 recipients, and the sender must have a record of a double-opt-in authorization on file or they are outside of the US Can Spam Act. Any ISP who allows their users to send bulk messages will quickly find that Google will limit their ability to a maximum of 100 messages in a 24 hour period for a werk or more - pending Google's seeing "regular" traffic from the IP again.

The same goes for YAHOO!.

I understand that users "like" groups, but they don't conform to the new bulk e-mail requirements and should not be allowed.
Bruce Barnes
ChicagoNetTech Inc
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I think this is a decision for the domain administrator to determine not smartermail. Again, users are able to do so in outlook using imap or pop using smartermail server, so it is pretty hard for me to convince them to use webmail instead of outlook when webmail lacks in features. When you send email to the same group of contacts on a daily report, you DO NOT want to have to select each person every single day. Very poor decision on smartermails part and currently has me looking at alternatives.

Jason Earle

IT Systems Administrator
JCL Investments Inc. | https://www.jclinc.ca
Jason, it is possible for users to create their own groups in webmail, but it's not very intuitive (SM calls them categories) and somewhat awkward as you have to edit each contact.
 
I suggested a simple enhancement to add a Group folder pane like Gmail has. You can create a new Group just like you create a new Folder for email. Vote for it here:
http://portal.smartertools.com/community/a86530/add-category-group-pane-to-contacts.aspx
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