Send Group Message

Send a message to selected members of a group.

Action Directory link: https://actions.getdrafts.com/a/1IJ

This action is handy when you deal with a group but often want to limit a message to certain people. I find it useful when messaging my family. Some messages go to everyone. A message about soccer practice might go to my spouse and one child. I might message just the kids about Mother’s Day plans.

The first script step is used to configure the action. Add member names and phone numbers, or email addresses, to the groupList:

const groupList = {
    "Carol": "7189872886",
    "Marsha": "5176582457",
    ...
}

The second step displays a prompt to select one or more members of the group.

  [x] Carol
  [ ] Marsha
  [ ] Jan
  [x] Cindy

The selections are added to the [[to]] template tag for use in subsequent steps.

The third step is the Drafts Message action. Customize the subject or body to suit your needs. Switch this to the Mail action if you send email to the group.

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Very useful action. thanks

I feel bad for Mike, Greg, Peter and Bobby. For once Jan isn’t the one being left out at least. :wink:

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Is there a way within the action to send to a group in Messages that has a custom name rather than just the people within the group?

Example: I have a running group text with my wife and our best friend called “Trio” in Messages. If I use this action to message them, this will create a separate thread in Messages. How can I send to the “Trio” thread instead.

Messages does not expose named conversations in this way, those are just internal to Messages.

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I tried some experiments and it doesn’t look like the group name works in the recipients field of the Drafts Message action. Don’t know if that’s something that could be added to Drafts or if it’s a limitation of iMessage. @agiletortoise might be able to confirm.

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Appreciate the answer. Thanks @agiletortoise too!

The compromise I came up with when I wanted to send a message to a named group is to leave the recipients blank, but copy the name of the group to the clipboard before launching the messages extension. That way you can just paste quickly and send.

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I really like the Group Message action created by @dchar in the Action Directory. I was wondering if there was a way to modify this to create a loop - allowing the same message to be sent individually, multiple times from the contacts selected. AT the same time this would avoid creating a grouped message chain. I realize I could send this “message” as an email using BCC, but for my needs, sending as a message is required.

Short answer: Yes. Totally possible with scripting. It’s actually on my list of examples to write, but I don’t get to that list often. I’ll see if I can get to it soon.

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Much appreciated! Great App.

Hi @Shelton

I took a crack at a new action, BCC group message, that loops over the selected contacts as you described. Let me know what you think.

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Thank you @dchar for working on this. But I was not able to import – received an import error “lnvalid Action, unable to import.” Message. I’m looking forward to checking this one out. Keep me posted. Again, thanks!

There’s an issue in the import that will be fixed in the next public release of Drafts. Sorry, I don’t know the time frame.

Is it definitely a bug in the existing public version? Not an incompatibility issue in the beta version?

I don’t know the specifics. That’s what @agiletortoise mention when I reported the issue.

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Thank you @dchar for a nice, clean BCC Group Message Action. https://actions.getdrafts.com/a/1N4

It works great! While each person on the list requires a separate “send” tap by me (I assume this is a requirement of Apple), it affords me the opportunity to selectively customize the message to one or more of the individuals if I’d like.

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Is there any way to send individual messages to mulitple persons on the list, not a group message?

This can be done, but due to limitation in the way the Messages API works, you would have to get multiple message windows pop up for each recipient and tap the send button for each. The BCC group message action in the directory is a good example of how this can be done.

If you need to do it without further interaction, you would have to use Shortcuts. Apple gets to do somethings with their apps that they do not allow other apps to do.