The Address Book application is often taken for granted or overlooked. This little application is really quite powerful & is used by many applications other than Mail.app to provide information about you and your contacts. Using the Address Book you can keep track of business contacts, your individual friends, and groups of friends. If you are running Tiger on your machine you can create smart groups of people that look at a specific field and group people together automagically if the contents of that field match your criteria. 
 
Address Book not only tracks names and email addresses, it can track multiple phone numbers, addresses, AIM/Jabber usernames, and even has a place for Notes. This little application is used by Mail, iChat, Safari, and many other applications. It is the central storage place in Mac OS X for all contact information. It is also used by iSync to sync your contacts with cell phones and PDA's. 
 
Groups of contacts can be used to send email to a large (or small) group of people. There are several ways to create a group of contacts. Under the File Menu you will see three items: New Group, New Group From Selection, and New Smart Group. The easiest way to create a group is 1) Create a new group using the new group menu item, 2) Name the group something unique, and 3) drag contact names to the new group. Another way to create groups is to cherry pick (using the Command key) the people you want in a group, and then select New Group From Selection in the file menu. You can address email to your groups by typing the group name in the To field in Mail.app. 
 
Smart Groups are a very powerful feature of the Address Book application. This feature was introduced in version 10.4 (Tiger) of OS X. This allows you to create a group that will automagically include any of your contacts that have a fresnochristian.com email address. To do this 1) select New Smart Group from the File menu, 2) give your group a unique name, 3) Select "Email" "contains" and enter "@fresnochristian.com", 4) Click OK. You have now created a FCS group that you don't have to manage! The fact that someone's email address contains the text "@fresnochristian.com" means a person is a part of that group. 
 
To remove someone from a standard group (not a smart group) you select the group, select the person, and click delete. You will be asked if you want to remove the person from the group or delete the person entirely.