MailShot User Guide 2: Setting Up Your First MailShot Group

We’ll walk step-by-step through setting up your first group in MailShot, showing what you can expect to see at each stage. From time to time we’ll also include links to the relevant parts of this User Guide where you can read more.

1. On the title screen, tap the top button. It should show you this “MailShot Groups” list, which will initially be empty (You can read more about what you can do on this page here)

Tap on the line with the blue “+” to create your first group.

2. Name the new group. Tap “Done” to finish (or the return key, if using a Bluetooth keyboard.)

3. You will now be taken to the page where you add contacts to create your group.

There are a couple of ways of adding contacts available, we’ll start with the simplest. Tap the blue “+” on the last line, or the bottom menu bar to select a single contact to add to your group.

4. Your current address book contacts list will appear. Select the contact you wish to add.

TIP If you don’t see the contact you are looking for, you may not be seeing contacts from all of your  address books. In this case tap the “Groups” button at the top left of the screen, and select “Show All Contacts” (this Groups button does not appear if there is only one address book on your device.)

5. If there is only one email address for the contact, that contact is automatically added to your MailShot group. When there are several email addresses available for the contact, a dialogue pops up, as shown above.

By toggling check marks in this dialogue you can select the appropriate address to include  (for example, if it’s a work group, you will probably want to add their work email address.) You can add several of their addresses at once.

Tap “Done” when you are finished.

6. You will now see your first contact in the MailShot group.

Add more contacts, by repeating from step 3, then continue…

TIP There are a number of different ways to add multiple contacts at once, all accessed from the “Import” button. See this page to learn more about them.

7. Now tap the “UPDATE” button, this step is important as it writes the special contact into your selected address book.

TIP: See here to change which address book MailShot will save contacts to.

8.  You are returned to the Groups page in MailShot, where your new group appears. You should see a message similar to that in the screenshot. Press “OK” to confirm.

10.  The special contacts MailShot creates can be used from Mail and tens of thousands of compatible iOS apps. We suggest that you test by sending from the standard Mail app first.

This next bit is quite important.

Write your email first, and then add the group to your email by tapping the the blue “+” button on the “To” line (NOT by typing the group name directly into the address line) . You can alternatively do this on the “Bcc:” line to protect your contacts’ privacy

11. Select the special contact that Mailshot created for you from the list in your address book (note that you will not find it on the Groups page, but in the contact list)

TIP: If you can’t see it in the contact list, you are probably not seeing contacts from all of your address books. Tap the “Groups” button at top left and select “Show All Contacts”, then tap “Done” and look again. 

12. And here it is, added to Mail. Just tap “Send” when you are ready, and your email will be sent to all the members of your MailShot group.

It is important not to switch apps after adding the group, before you tap “Send”.  This is why we recommend adding the group last.

TIP: follow the steps here if you want to edit or check the group before you send.

Now read on if you’d like to learn more about how to get the most from MailShot.

On to 3: The Group Page