How do I manage contact lists?
I have a list called Collected Addresses. I also have another list called Personal Address Book which I no longer use. I need to know how to move addresses from Personal Address Book to the Collected Addresses list, and delete Personal Address Book. I'd also like to know how to create and delete address books or lists.
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I prefer to call these "address books", because that's what Thunderbird calls them. It also has things called "Mailing Lists", so your referring to an "address book" as a "list" seems a recipe for confusion. Notwithstanding that having things called "address books" inside a thing called the "Address Book" is also somewhat unhelpful.
Thunderbird is hard-coded to use both Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses. If you do remove either of these it will just silently replace it.
I think you're using them back to front. PAB is intended to be the working default address book. It is the target for the "add to address book" action when you click on an address in an email header. CA is the default location for the collecting of addresses that you send to if they are not already somewhere in your Address Book. In my experience some addresses that are automatically added to CA have no place in my Address Book and I'd be annoyed if they "polluted" my real working address book.
If you were going to stop using one of these two, I'd recommend that you use PAB and ignore CA. You can set the default adding of unknown contacts to go to PAB rather than CA. Look under Tools|Options|Composition.
Why would you delete PAB and then go ahead to create new address books? You can rename it if its name offends you. But it will still be the default target for the adding of new Contacts.
To move a Contact, in theory you drag and drop Contacts from one address book to another. You open the donor, then drag and drop onto the transplantee's icon. I say "in theory" because I have Thunderbird installed on two different systems and in neither case does drag-and-drop work, at present. This may be add-on related, but I haven't tried in Safe Mode to check this out.
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Chosen Solution
I prefer to call these "address books", because that's what Thunderbird calls them. It also has things called "Mailing Lists", so your referring to an "address book" as a "list" seems a recipe for confusion. Notwithstanding that having things called "address books" inside a thing called the "Address Book" is also somewhat unhelpful.
Thunderbird is hard-coded to use both Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses. If you do remove either of these it will just silently replace it.
I think you're using them back to front. PAB is intended to be the working default address book. It is the target for the "add to address book" action when you click on an address in an email header. CA is the default location for the collecting of addresses that you send to if they are not already somewhere in your Address Book. In my experience some addresses that are automatically added to CA have no place in my Address Book and I'd be annoyed if they "polluted" my real working address book.
If you were going to stop using one of these two, I'd recommend that you use PAB and ignore CA. You can set the default adding of unknown contacts to go to PAB rather than CA. Look under Tools|Options|Composition.
Why would you delete PAB and then go ahead to create new address books? You can rename it if its name offends you. But it will still be the default target for the adding of new Contacts.
To move a Contact, in theory you drag and drop Contacts from one address book to another. You open the donor, then drag and drop onto the transplantee's icon. I say "in theory" because I have Thunderbird installed on two different systems and in neither case does drag-and-drop work, at present. This may be add-on related, but I haven't tried in Safe Mode to check this out.
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Thank you I'm having trouble getting both the CA and PAB address books open at the same time so I can drag and drop from one to another. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see what.
You don't need to open both.
Open the one containing the Contact you want to move. Drag it onto the other address book's icon.
Hmm, gContactSync seems to be the culprit. I can't drag and drop between address books while it is installed and enabled.