Maintain an email group on iPad - no Mac involved I can't find an answer to this one here or elsewhere, so here goes. I have a friend who would like to maintain some school-based email lists using an iPad. She doesn't use any computers for this purpose and would like to keep it that way. As one of the people who organises social activities and volunteers among the school community it is often necessary to send an email to a group of people. The groups are typically between three and 20 people - think "3rd grade mothers jogging group" or "classroom volunteers".

Ideally the groups would


be created on the iPad through Contacts, from existing Contacts
send email without exposing the complete distribution list in the To: line
easily add or remove recipients as required


Group features provided by software like majordomo (self-subscribe, list digests etc.) are a little beyond what we want here. I just can't see how to make Contacts create a list of people and easily send an email to them without including a huge To: line in each email. Nobody is that paranoid about their emails being exposed but it seems like best practise not to, there's always that person who thinks everyone wants to be on their "funny" picture mailing list, some addresses will be corporate and that kind of thing can cause problems for the recipient.

It's fine if there's a free or paid app you can suggest, ease of use is the number one requirement.
May I suggest our unique "MailShot Pro" app, which is the ONLY app on the store that lets you create contact groups in your address book that you can use from any app to send email, just as you would use a single contact.

We have tens of thousands of users using it for exactly the sort of thing you describe


You can protect privacy by adding the contact group to the Bcc line.
You can edit the group permanently in the MailShot app, or temporarily just before you send an email (simply by saving and retrieving the email from Drafts)
And you can share groups between multiple devices using iCloud contact sharing.


http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mailshot-pro-group-email-done/id445996226?ls=1&amp;mt=8. (A free trial version is also available.)

Peter

Soluble Apps

Full Disclosure:I am the developer of MailShot and will benefit from its sale, but so might you :)