Is this the same computer you previously used Thunderbird on? If so it may have picked up your previous Address Book.

Thunderbird's Address Book comes with two built-in address books, Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses. From a clean start, they have no "sub folders".

"Contacts" is typically created if addresses ("Contacts") are imported from a different address book.

The things you call sub-folders are actually Mailing Lists, similar to groups or distribution lists in other email programs. If you routinely write to the same group of people, a Mailing List bundles them together so you only need to enter the Mailing List's name and it automatically expands, on sending, to the list of Contacts it contains.

You can delete the "sub folders" with no effect on anything else. Similarly you can remove any address book you don't want or need. You can consolidate address books by dragging Contacts from one to another.

Since the Mailing Lists are subsets of their parent address books, if you remove a Contact from an address book, that Contact will also vanish from any Mailing Lists in that same address book.

To summarize:

• A Contact is an individual and his street address, email address, phone number etc.
• Personal Address Book, Collected Addresses etc are separate address book divisions. In addition to these two which are built in, you can add any number of your own. Some users make use of these to collate related Contacts, such as Business, Personal, Family, Church and so on.
• A Mailing List, which looks like a sub-folder, is a subset of Contacts from its parent address book, and may be used to address many correspondents as a single entity.
• "Address Book" is the collective name for the whole thing.

Thank you for your comprehensive explanation. Yes, Zenos, it's the same computer. The sub folders aren't mailing lists, they are subdirectories I created in Outlook to contain individual addresses. It was my way of sorting/managing hundreds of addys. If, say, I want to write to a couple of author friends, in Outlook I clicked on the Authors subfolder and a list of all my author friends would appear. Then I'd select the one(s) I wanted. Sending an email did not send it to all authors in this subfolder. I do have a few distribution lists, which do mass mailings.

In any case, somehow I have now totally screwed it all up. I was trying to again import my Outlook Address Book, thinking the new would simply merge with the old and add in any new addresses. How wrong I was! Now I have several Address Books with some names, some initials, and very few email addresses. Somehow in the process of doing what ought to be a simple import has lost me most of my listings.

I've wasted hours on this, first trying to figure out why Outlook is greyed out on the Import File list. It wasn't until having spent at least three hours fiddling that I discovered someone questioning the forum with the same problem. The answer is: TB 38.5.1 can't import from Outlook! Terrific. So now, having tried all the workarounds, I've lost hundreds of email addys.

One of the workarounds is to export from Outlook to a CSV file, which I did. I chose CSV Windows, not CSV DOS. (I'm in Windows Vista.) Then in TB I chose Import/Address Books and selected my csv file. It was downhill after that.

I'm guessing that part of my problem is this "mapping" business. I have no clue what it is; there's no explanation in the Import section that I can find. Further, somewhere I noticed the option "Record 1", so perhaps I'm "mapping" only Record 1, and not the other several hundred in my Outlook address book. I don't understand the concept at all.

If anyone can help me sort this out and help me find/recover the lost addys, I'm immensely grateful. I suspect now, having gone through this painfully frustrating, time-wasting exercise, that this is why I uninstalled TB the last time. Shouldn't an email program have an easier way of managing email addresses?!?!? DU-UH!!

I don't know how other mail clients use subfolders in their address books, but the bottom line here is that Thunderbird doesn't, and so wouldn't know what to do with them. Furthermore, CSV format are "flat" files; they are incapable of representing such nested data.

I think that between user-defined address books and mailing lists you can approximate the same sort of functionality but the bad news is that you can't import another address book's subfolders.

Maybe you can export them to discrete CSV files, and then on importing to Thunderbird they would become user-defined address books.

The data in your CSV file has columns of data, each representing some part of what you know about the Contact; postal address at home, postal address at work, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. These will come in whatever order and with whatever labels or names that the source program uses. Thunderbird has its own set of data categories; the mapping process is simply the business of identifying what each data field represents and matching it up to the appropriate field in Thunderbird. The second half of this article describes one approach to using the address book import manager,

Some users prefer to refer to a list of the fields and do the re-ordering in a spreadsheet program. e.g. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_address_list_from_text_file

However you do it, it needs to be encoded in UTF-8; you can do this by opening the CSV file in Notepad and using Save As to ensure it has the right encoding. This is particularly significant if you use Excel, which uses ANSI encoding.

My apologies for not replying sooner; it's been a busy week and doing computer programming for my address book on top of everything is overwhelming. I so appreciate your taking time to help me.

Looking quickly at your reply, I gather "discrete CSV files" would be single, rather than a collection of lists/files. And your explanation of mapping CSV files is terrific, but doesn't seem to answer whether I need to do this for all 500+ entries in my address book on an individual basis. (Am I understanding what Record 1 and Record 2 means? I'm thinking it means each and every one.)

Finally, if I do a Save as in Notepad to assure this special coding, won't it lose all my columns and therefore be un-importable to TB?

Frankly, I'm thinking it will be easier to copy and paste from each Outlook record into a New Contact sheet in TB as I need them!!

Thanks again for all your help!  :D

have you actually received any mail in this copy of Thunderbird that is not in Outlook, or you can not afford to loose.

I think a clean start with an import from outlook is what is needed.

If a clean start is possible, please post back and I will tell you how to delete everything that is there now and import it from Outlook, starting with removing your existing profile and installing Version 31 which can import from outlook.

                                          --o00O00o--

On another topic. Going back some what.

Thunderbird places all the contacts from an outlook sub folder into the main contacts list for that address book. It also creates a mailing list for those contacts as that is the closest Thunderbird comes to the sub folder paradigm used by Outlook. Deleting mailing lists or entries from mailing lists does not remove them from the main listing for that address book.