Some ambiguity over the use of the word "emails" . When you say "5 emails" do you mean messages or addresses?

Thunderbird's Address Book has the ability to store three (or is it 2?) email addresses per Contact. There are add-ons that take this up to 5 per Contact.

Are you working with multiple email addresses per Contact, or with multiple Contact entries, one per email address?

It shows the same contact and same address five times. I found if (without opening address book or selecting a contact) click on "write" and the "contacts sidebar" is selected in "view", I can expand the "thunderbird address book" and there are five or six entries: a couple of thunderbird address book backups, a personal address book, and a couple of thunderbird address book all listed. If I can just select one of these to be opened in my address book from the Mail Toolbar, that is what I want.

thanks

Question owner

It shows the same contact and same address five times. I found if (without opening address book or selecting a contact) click on "write" and the "contacts sidebar" is selected in "view", I can expand the "thunderbird address book" and there are five or six entries: a couple of thunderbird address book backups, a personal address book, and a couple of thunderbird address book all listed. If I can just select one of these to be opened in my address book from the Mail Toolbar, that is what I want.

thanks

Well, I think it's down to you to triage your address books, locate and remove the duplicates and decide which one of your many address books you want any particular Contact to be stored in.

There are add-ons to help with this, but even with this help, it's quite tedious picking between the multiple entries and deciding which is up to date or most complete. If the duplicates have grown spontaneously, then you may have something horrible going on, and I'd look at exporting the data, deleting the affected address book and then re-creating it by importing the exported data.

In TB38, the Contacts Sidebar has a new "All Address Books" option which aggregates all your address books into one virtual composite address book. This simplifies searching for those who don't know or recall to which book they added a Contact.

Below "All Address Books" you should be able to select any single address book and therefore see only the entries in it. Of course, if you have multiple instances of a Contact in one address book, that's what you will see. It simply presents what it contains.