Email groups in Microsoft 365 (often called distribution groups) allow you distribute a single email sent to your organisation to multiple members of staff. This is great when you have a team of staff within the same department or with a common goal as it allows for wider communication within the team and may reduce administrative overhead.
An example of where this may be useful is if you need to distribute changes in a regulation to your accounting team who may be all physically separated. You could have an group named accounts, where all your accounting team are a member and you can send a single email, which all the members of the accounting team would receive.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out some of our recent, relevant posts:
How to create an email group in Microsoft 365
- Start by logging into the Microsoft 365 admin portal (admin.microsoft.com)
- Select Teams & Groups, then Active teams & groups
- Select Distribution list from the menu and click Add a group. Note: there are different types of groups available to choose from, I have broken them down in this post here.
- You will be asked to choose a group type again, select Distribution and click Next
- Choose a group name and enter a description. It is important you use the description field to include relevant information on the purpose of the group and who/why is was created
- You will then be asked to assign an owner of the group. The owner will have unique permissions to manage to group and will be able to add and remove members as well has change settings such as the group name and description
- Now you can add members of the group. Both users, contacts and Shared mailboxes can be members of a distribution group
- Lastly you will be asked for the group email address and if you want external users to be enabled to send messages to the group or not. If you leave that option unticked, only members of your organisation will be able to send messages to your group
- Click Next and Create Group
You have now created your email group in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center! Be sure to head back to our Microsoft 365 Admins Guidebook for more!
FAQ
- How many members can you add to a distribution group? – you can have up to 100,000 members
- How many owners of a distribution group can you have? – you can have up to 10 owners
- How many distribution groups can you create? – you can create up to 300,000 distribution groups
