If you apply Address Book and Mail , hopefully you ’re use up advantage of Address Book ’s power to create group and smart group . Groups in Address Book can be used in Mail by name — make it easy , for representative , to institutionalise an email to all your relative , your group of friends from college , or any other aggregation of people you ’d manage to make .

To make a raw grouping in Address Book , choose File - > New Group or File - > New Smart Group ( or just apply the plus sign at the lower leftover niche ; hold Option and it changes to a gear picture for a newfangled smart group ) , give it a name ( The Family ) , and then drag the hope contacts into the group ( or set the conditions for a overbold group ) . Then in Mail , when you ’re creating a raw electronic mail , you may plow it to The Family , and all the relevant email address will appear .

But help with produce and using mathematical group in Address Book and Mail is n’t really the subject of today ’s hint . alternatively , the object glass today is to key those Address Book contacts who may not yet be in any groups . You may , for instance , have escape Uncle Ned when create your My class group , and it ’d be a shame if he did n’t see the invitation to the upcoming family reunion . But how can you make certain you included all your relatives in your chemical group ?

As you may already know , one way to check is to foreground a contact and then press the Option tonality . When you do , the group to which that contact belongs will be highlighted in the Group column . While this works well enough for an item-by-item contact , it ’s not a really effective direction to check all 250 entries in your Address Book — plus you ’d have to jot down down those inter-group communication who hail up with no group affiliation . You might think you could use a smart group , but unfortunately , Group is n’t one of the standard you could apply to limit a smart mathematical group ’s conditions . But thanks to an insightful macosxhints.com referee , there is a relatively simple way to find all your ungrouped contacts : AppleScript .

The script is comparatively self - explanatory , but here ’s a bit more particular on how it function . The first line is the only one you want to blue-pencil ; changeUngroupedto whatever you ’d wish to name your young group , or you could leave it as is . Be sure to depart the quotes intact if you do change the name .

The first thing the handwriting does is see if there ’s an existing Ungrouped grouping ; if there is , it delete it to start bracing ( the version of this script posted on macosxhints.com did n’t work in this style , but I was getting discrepant event with it ) . The script then create a new vacuous group and cycles through the your contacts , bestow anyone without a group membership to the Ungrouped group .