How to create an email group in Gmail (and when you need a Google Group instead)

Gmail has no button called "create group". Google Contacts has something close: its help page is titled "View, group & share contacts", its steps say "Create a group", and the thing you end up with is called a label. That one naming choice is why guides on this topic so often disagree with each other. Some mean a label in your contacts, some mean a Google Group with its own address, and a few mean a Google Group set up so a team can answer customers from it.

This page covers all three. You'll get the click path for a contact label (on a computer, from inside Gmail, and on Android), how to send a group email to it without exposing everyone's address, how to create a Google Group with a personal or a work account, why your work account might not let you, and the settings that cause trouble in the first week. Every step and every number below was checked against Google's own help and admin pages in October 2026. If you're on Outlook instead, the Outlook version of this guide covers the same ground there.

The short version

• For most people, an email group in Gmail is a contact label. Create it in Google Contacts (Create label, next to "Labels" on the left), add people, then type the label's name into To in Gmail. It's yours alone and has no address of its own.
• If the team needs one address that anyone can mail, like parents@ or sales@, you want a Google Group. Anyone can create one at groups.google.com with a personal Gmail account. With a work account, your admin decides whether you can.
• If people need to reply as that address and see who's handling what, a plain group isn't enough. You need a group with Collaborative Inbox turned on, or a setup where everyone can send as the group address.
• Gmail has nothing called a distribution list. The contact label is the personal version, a Google Group is the shared one.

Which email group do you actually want?

Three different objects answer the question, and they behave differently enough that picking the wrong one costs you a redo later. The deciding questions are whether the group needs an address of its own, and whether anyone has to answer mail sent to it.

If you're deciding between a list and something a team answers from, our comparison of a distribution list and a shared mailbox walks through the Google Workspace side of that choice. The third column is a separate setup, and turning a group into a Collaborative Inbox has its own page because the permissions behind it trip people up.

One more naming trap: Gmail also has labels for email, the ones in your left sidebar. Those organize messages, not people, and Google's page on Gmail labels is explicit that "Only you can access your labels." Everything below is about contact labels, which live in Google Contacts.

How to create a contact label in Google Contacts

The steps are on Google's View, group & share contacts page, and they take under a minute on a computer:

1. Go to contacts.google.com.
2. On the left, next to Labels, click Create label.
3. Type a name and click Save.
4. Check the box next to each contact you want in it (or use Selection Actions > All to select every contact).
5. Click Manage labels at the top, click the label, then Apply.

To take someone out, open the label, select the contact, click Label at the top right, and uncheck it.

One detail decides whether the label actually works: "If a contact has multiple email addresses, only their default email address is added to the label group." Google's tip continues: "You can use the Contacts app on an Android device to change the default email address for a contact." That's the only route Google documents, so if someone keeps getting your group emails at their old work address, fix the default on an Android phone (steps below) or give the contact the right address as its only one.

From inside Gmail compose

You don't have to leave Gmail. Click Compose, then click the word To, Cc or Bcc to open your contacts. Check the people you want, click Manage labels, and either pick an existing label and click Apply, or click Create label to make a new one on the spot. This is the fastest way if you're already writing to the group and realize you'll do it again next week.

On Android

The Android tab of the same Google page has its own steps, with a warning that "Some of these steps only work on Android 14 and up."

1. Open the Contacts app.
2. At the top, tap Label, then New label.
3. Enter a name and tap OK.
4. Tap Add contact and pick someone. To add several, touch and hold one contact, tap the others, then tap Add.

To change which address a contact uses for the label, open the contact, touch and hold an email address, and tap Set default.

Google's page has no iPhone steps at all, only Computer and Android. On an iPhone, the reliable route is contacts.google.com in a browser, and the label belongs to your account wherever you create it.

How to send a group email to the label

In Gmail on a computer, click Compose, start typing the label's name in To, and select it from the list that appears. Google's page puts it this way: "You'll see a list of contacts in the 'To' field." The label doesn't stay a label. It expands into every individual address, and every recipient sees every other recipient.

Google documents this step for Gmail on a computer only. If the label doesn't show up when you type it on your phone, write the email on a computer instead.

Without showing everyone's address

For a list of parents, volunteers or customers, that expansion is a privacy problem. Our advice: put your own address in To and type the label name into Bcc the same way. Google only documents typing a label into To, so before you mail the whole list, send a test with the label in Bcc to yourself and one other address you own. Each person gets the email, nobody sees the list, and you keep a copy. Do this every time the group includes people who don't know each other.

How many people a label can reach

Because a label sends to each person individually, it counts against your account's per-message and per-day limits like any other email. These are the numbers Google publishes:

If you go over on a personal account, Google says you should be able to send again "within 1 to 24 hours", and its suggestion for avoiding it next time is to try "creating a Google Group of all your email recipients and sending the message to that group's email address." Google doesn't say how a group address counts against these limits, so treat that as Google's recommendation rather than a guarantee. On Workspace, if your label is mostly customers or other outside addresses, the external caps are the ones you'll hit first, not the 10,000. The daily limits run over a rolling 24-hour period, and the same page notes that Google Groups has "its own Gmail message and posting limits."

How to create a Google Group

A Google Group gives the email group its own address. People can mail it without knowing who's on it, membership lives in one place, and when someone joins or leaves, it changes for everyone. Google's page on creating a group and choosing its settings has the steps, and they're the same whether you sign in with a personal or a work account:

1. Sign in to Google Groups.
2. At the top, click Create group.
3. Enter a name (up to 73 characters), the group's email address (up to 63 characters before the @), and an optional description.
4. Choose the privacy settings: who can search for the group, who can join, who can view conversations, who can post, and who can view members.
5. Add members, managers and owners, or skip this for now.
6. Click Create group.

Then wait. Google: "Wait a few minutes for your new group to become active before sending a message to it. Otherwise, you might get a notification that your message couldn't be delivered." A bounce on your very first test message usually means you were too quick, not that something's broken.

With a personal Gmail account

A personal account can create a group too. It lives in the public googlegroups.com domain, so the address ends in @googlegroups.com rather than your own domain. That's fine for a club, a class or a family. For a business address customers will see, it usually isn't, and that's the main reason to get the group created on your work domain instead.

Adding people

Open the group, go to Members, and click Add members. With Directly add members turned on, people are added straight away; turn it off and they get an invitation they have to accept. Google's page on adding people to a group says "A group can have unlimited members", with one catch for personal groups: "You can invite but can't directly add users without a Google Account to groups ending in @googlegroups.com." Anyone without a Google account has to accept an invitation.

On a work account, the Groups for Business limits cap additions in the web interface at "200 per session". Those limits apply to what you do in the Google Groups site. An admin adding members through the Admin console isn't bound by them.

Why you can't create a group in your work account

Your admin either turned off Groups for Business or set group creation to admins only. If Create group is missing or greyed out on your work account, that's a decision someone made, usually without anyone noticing. Two switches decide it.

Groups for Business has to be on. That's the service behind groups.google.com for your organization. Google's page on turning Groups for Business on or off says that when it's off, "Your organization's groups aren't available at Google Groups." Existing groups keep working by email, but nobody can create new ones there. Google doesn't say whether it starts on or off, and organizations differ, so check rather than assume.

The "Creating groups" setting has to let you. In the organization-wide groups policies, an admin picks one of three options: "Only organization admins can create groups", "Anyone in the organization can create groups" or, if groups can be public, "Anyone on the internet can create groups". Google lists "Anyone in the organization" as the default. So if Groups for Business is on and you still can't create a group, someone changed this to admins only.

Either way, the request goes to IT. Ask for the group by name and address and say who needs to be in it, and they can create it for you in a couple of minutes.

If you're the admin: the Admin console route

From Google's page on creating a group in your organization, which requires the Groups administrator privilege:

1. In the Admin console, go to Menu > Directory > Groups.
2. At the top, click Create group.
3. Enter the name, email address and description, and add owners if you want to. The next screens ask for an optional security label and then the access type: Public, Team, Announcement only or Restricted.
4. Choose who can join, and whether to Allow external members in the group.
5. Click Create Group, then add members.

The same page is blunt about the other side: "If you're not an admin, you must use Google Groups to create a group." It also notes that a group created in Google Groups "can't be used to configure features or services", so groups you'll use to roll out settings belong in the Admin console. A new group can take up to 24 hours to show up in your organization's groups directory, even when it already receives mail.

Settings to get right on day one

These are the ones that come back as support tickets a week later. The details are all on Google's group settings page and the admin policy page linked above.

• Outside senders are blocked unless two settings allow them. In the organization-wide policies, the option that lets group owners accept "Incoming emails from outside the organization" is unchecked by default, and so is the one for external members. Leaving both unchecked "means that group owners can't allow external group members or emails", although it "doesn't prevent admins from allowing external members or messages for specific groups in the Admin console". The second switch is on the group itself: Who can post, which Google defines as "who can send messages to the group email address", has to include people outside your organization. If you created sales@ in Google Groups and customers' mail bounces, one of those two is the usual reason. Ask an admin to allow outside email for that group, then check Who can post.
• External members follow the same rule. Allow external members only appears on your group if your admin has turned on the organization-wide option for it.
• Your address might get renamed. Admins can add a suffix to user-created groups. Google's example: with the suffix -user-created, a group you create as training@altostrat.com becomes training-user-created@altostrat.com. It only applies to groups created at groups.google.com, which is one more reason to have an admin create customer-facing addresses.
• Decide where replies go. Under Post replies to, the choices run from all group members to the author of the original message only, plus a custom address. For an announcement list, sending replies only to the author stops one "thanks!" from reaching 200 inboxes.
• Moderate non-members. You can hold messages for approval from nobody, from non-members, or from everyone. For a group that accepts outside mail, moderating non-members is a sensible first line against spam.
• Digests need conversation history. Members can choose each email or a digest, but Google's page notes that "To receive abridged summaries or digests of a group's messages, you must turn on conversation history."

When people need to reply as the group

Here's where a group stops being enough. Say you create orders@ as a Google Group with four members and allow outside mail. A customer writes in on a Friday afternoon about a missing parcel. All four people get their own copy, each assumes one of the others has it, and on Monday the customer writes again, this time from a different address and with the word "chargeback" in the subject. Nothing failed. A group delivers copies, and copies don't come with an owner.

A contact label can't fix that at all, since it has no address. A Google Group can be made to fit, in two steps that each have their own page:

• Turn on Collaborative Inbox so conversations can be assigned to one person and marked as done. How Google's Collaborative Inbox works covers the setting that has to come first, and the two permissions behind assignment are the part that trips teams up.
• Let people reply as the group address instead of their own. On the group's side that's the Who can post as group permission; on each person's side it's a send-as setup in their Gmail, and replying as the shared address has the steps, including the one people forget.

Those aren't the only routes. The ways to share a Gmail address with a team compares delegation, Google's shared inbox setting and the group route side by side, and how a shared inbox works once a team answers from one address covers the habits that keep it from becoming everyone's second unread pile.

Even with all of that in place, a group still leaves "whose turn is this?" to the team. Once an address gets enough mail that a thread like that parcel one slips every week, a shared inbox tool like TriageFlow connects to your existing Gmail or Google Workspace account and assigns each incoming email to one person. If you want a rough sense of whether that's worth it, the shared inbox ROI calculator takes your team size, hourly cost, daily email volume, handling time and current setup (one option reads "Gmail / Google Workspace: Using labels, filters, or delegated access") and estimates the hours you'd save per week and the money per month and year.

Frequently asked questions

How do I create a group email in Gmail?

Create a contact label in Google Contacts, add the people, then type the label's name into the To field when you compose. Gmail fills in every address on the label. If the group needs an address of its own that other people can mail, create a Google Group at groups.google.com instead.

What's the difference between a contact label and a Google Group?

A contact label is your private shortcut: it lives in your contacts and turns into a list of individual addresses when you send. A Google Group is its own email address with its own members, so anyone the group allows can mail it, and membership changes apply to everyone at once.

Can I create a Google Group with a regular Gmail account?

Yes. Sign in at groups.google.com and click Create group. The group lives in the public googlegroups.com domain, and people without a Google account can join by invitation but can't be added directly.

Can I create a distribution list in Gmail?

Not by that name. A contact label is the personal version, and a Google Group, which has its own address, is the shared one. If one email would go to more than 500 recipients on a personal account, Google's own help points you to the group.

Can other people use my contact label?

Not as a shared list. Google's Contacts help only documents sharing individual contacts, not labels; the one exception is on work accounts, where someone you've given access to your Gmail can manage labels on your contacts too. If three colleagues need to email the same people, a Google Group is the better tool: one list, kept up to date in one place.

Why do some recipients get my group email at an old address?

The label picked their default address, and for that contact it's the wrong one. On Android, open the contact, touch and hold the right address and tap Set default; the label uses the new one from your next email.

Bottom line

If you just want to stop typing the same addresses, a contact label takes a minute and is the right answer. It's when a second person needs the same list that a Google Group earns its place, and when a customer replies to that group that you find out whether you needed a list at all. Create the label today, and keep the rest of this page for that week.