Group intersections for hundreds of groups

[lolas]

A lot of organizations use a few general groups to denote general participation in activities, mostly mailings.

For example one big general group:
"I agree to receive mailings from this organization (x)"

Others need a couple of groups to select mailings:
"I want to receive mailings in: (x) English, (x) French" or "I want to receive communications about: (x) Local Issues, (x) National issues"

If we then have 100's of committees/interest groups that are also groups we would like to easily send an email to one particular committee in their preferred language(s).
I know we can create a smart group using the Include/Exclude search. (Twice for both English and French in the second example.)
I would like to avoid having to do this for every group, EG. every time the user creates a new interest group or committee they have to create the extra Smart groups.

To me it would be great if the create mailing interface allowed the person creating the mailing to select the option
"Send to Contacts who are in all of the selected groups" instead of "Send to contacts who are in any of the selected groups".

I've run into this before and it seems like this would be a common requirement. Can anyone suggest a set up to make this easier?

[JonGold]

I think this is going to get harder to make work, UI-wise, with the changes in Civi 4.6.  Which is a shame, because I think you have a good point, but overall I think the UI changes to how mailing groups are selected is an improvement.

For your use case, another approach is to use Search Builder combined with the "Schedule/Send a Mass Mailing" action.  Search is:
"Contacts Groups = Local Issues"
"Contacts Groups = French"

That should return you only contacts in both groups, then you can use the "Schedule/Send a Mass Mailing" to start CiviMail.

[lolas]

Thanks for the suggested workflow. I had forgotten about the mass mailing action since I always go to the mailings menu. That will basically do the trick.

I also posted this as a comment on the blog post about the mailing UI because I still think it would be a really great option for end users to have right in the mailing UI.