Adding members to group: specify name as well as email address?

[Daniel Griscom]

I'm managing mailing lists for a church, and working on migrating a bunch of mailing lists to Google Groups. For management purposes it is invaluable to have names associated with each group membership, so instead of sink...@verizon.net we see "Johnny Smith <sink...@verizon.net>".

I have been able to use gam to add group members, but there seems to be no way to specify an associated name. Note that the great majority of group members will NOT be in the church's domain, so creating a user for that email address isn't an option.

When using gam to add a member to a group, is there a way to specify both the member's name and email address?


Thanks,
Dan

P.S. Some background: Google Groups can track names of external email addresses, and using the Groups Service UI we can add new members with names. However, that UI limits you to a total of 100 subscriptions per day for your whole domain, which means it'll take a week+ for us to do the whole migration process. The Google Apps support hotline suggested FlashPanel or the Google Apps API to get around this limit, but FlashPanel doesn't seem to support adding members with names, and I'm not (yet) up to using the raw Google Apps API to do work.