I’ve just installed emclient 9 and am learning to use it. I’ve searched through the forums and help files and online searches, and everything indicates that I should be able to just type in a distribution list name and it will populate the To: field. My distribution lists all show up in my contacts, imported from Google Workplace contacts. But when I type in the name of a distribution list, or the first part of the name, it doesn’t show the distribution list. And if I enter the full name of the distribution list and tab out of it, nothing happens. Is there a way to do this, or am I missing something?
Any help is much appreciated! Overall I’m super impressed with emclient, but this has me stumped.
To create a distribution list, go to 'Menu / ‘New’. A list of options will appear. For eM Client for Windows, you need to click the drop-down arrow on the right of new for the distribution list.
Next choose the one that says ‘Distribution List’. The Distribution List window will appear and there you can add the list name at the top. Next add all the contacts & email addresses you want for the distribution list. Then save & close that window.
Then when you start a new email, all you have to do is put in the name of the Distribution List in the ‘To’ field. Write your email, and then send it as a mass email, which means just clicking on the menu and then choose ‘Send as mass mail’.
See also eM Client 9.x documentation on creating and sending a distribution list.
You can’t import directly into a distribution list.
But what you can do is save the spreadsheet as a csv file, then import it into eM Client using Menu > File > Import > Contacts as comma separated values (csv). Import them into a separate folder so they don’t get mixed up with your other contacts. Once that’s done you can select all those contacts in that folder in eM Client and by right-click choose Create Distribution List. You can then delete the individual imported contacts leaving just the DL.
Just be aware that not all providers will support distribution lists, so you may have to save the DL in Local Folders, rather than your synced contacts folder. Also, when it comes time to send to the list, your provider may have restrictions on how many recipients you can have per message, so you may have to create 2 DLs each with 100 members for example rather than a single DL with 200 members.
I ran into a silly GUI issue when trying to create a new distribution list. Clicking on the “New” button in the upper left corner of the eM Client window would simply open the New Contact dialog box (if you’re on the Contacts page) or New Email dialog box (if you’re on the Email page). I tried everything – clicking repeatedly, changing pages, restarting, etc. The “New” pulldown – the one containing the subcommands “Distribution List”, “Event”, etc. – simply would not appear. After researching it a bit, I finally realized it’s because you must click on the little ARROW within the New button, not on the CENTER of the button. That seems crazy. But as it turns out, the word “New” and the little arrow are actually two separate buttons. The problem is that in the Classic interface theme, they look like one button, because the little vertical line separating the two buttons is the same color as the buttons themselves. So there you go.
By the way, the instructions on creating distribution lists at Bulk Emails the Easy Way with eM Client | eM Client are ancient and fairly useless. It’s an 11-year-old blog entry, which misled me and made it harder to figure out my problem. The blog really needs to make it obvious that the instructions apply to a super old version.