Bonton said

Saw the article about importing Thunderbird to a new computer, but that is not where I am at.

And for that reason you are having problems. As you have already established the address book import only imports some of them.

You can start installing add-ons and using the feature they supply to import the other address books, about which time you will probably work out you had things in local folders that are missing, or calendar entries and tasks that are just missing. That is why there is an article about moving things.

You can import the MAB files with this add-on https://freeshell.de//~kaosmos/morecols-en.html however it has not yet been updated for Thunderbird 60 by it's author, so you will need to install and older version to do he import and then upgrade again.

This is the available information on importing address books. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles

Note the article refers to the same add-on I do. it does not install in Thunderbird V60.

Just want to say thank you. Seems like it should be made easier than that. Only exporting like to like. Not like from MS Mail or Gmail. But thanks for taking the time to address this for me..it is appreciated.

Lots of things should be simplified, but Thunderbird has a lot of what the developers call "technical debt" which grew while Mozilla was developing Thunderbird, (it was never a high priority). The community then struggled for a few years after Mozilla withdrew in 2012, simply to keep the project alive and in a position that it could be built. One of the reasons they gave for dropping Thunderbird was so they could concentrate on making Firefox faster. That translated to wholesale changes withing Mozilla's build infrastructure including the engine both Thunderbird and Firefox use. You would thing change would be good, but in this case it often meant they ripped out bits Thunderbird used, but Firefox did not.

It is only in the last 12 months really that donations from users have made it to the point developers can be hired to move things forward instead of just keeping things from falling down. It is only through continued donations by the user base that Thunderbird will grow. One of the difficulties with this has been that people do not know that Thunderbird is funded separately from Mozilla. A donation to Mozilla is not a donation to Thunderbird. Of course the reverse is also true.

Thanks for the explanation on why using Thunderbird is not necessarily easier when confronted with a problem. I have contributed to Thunderbird with $$, don't have the know-how to contribute to the actual programming. Hope this email client stays in the loop, cause MS MAIL is terrible.