I wouldn't expect groups in other address books to import into Thunderbird's address book.

If you build a "group" - that's a Mailing List in Thunderbird parlance - does it then work? In the Address Book, File|New|Mailing List….

The behaviour you describe is normal for a Thunderbird Mailing List; it doesn't expand to its constituent member Contacts. In fact, one use for Mailing Lists is to send a message to many recipients, bypassing a limit of about 60 discrete addresses built into Thunderbird, and this relies on the way a Mailing List does not expose its contents.

I imported my address book from another email app with groups and they sent just fine in Thunderbird until I updated a couple of days ago (3 Sep 2014). Now my groups are not sending in Thunderbird. My wife built a group with the last version of Thunderbird and when we updated, her Thunderbird constructed group is rejected also.

UPDATE: Re-installed version 24.8.0 and group emails are working again. Here's to hoping TB will fix this in the next update, otherwise will be--sadly--looking for another email program.

My problem is that groups are no longer recognised and cannot be used to send emails. Does Mozilla respond to this problem or do we have to wait for a clever user to find the solution? The problem for me is fundamental and will shortly affect whether I have to find an alternative program.

There is a bug in TB31 that causes some Mailing Lists not to work. Some of the failures may be cured by editing out spaces in the description.

This particular bug is reported to be fixed in TB32, but some users report new faults with alphabetic sorting.

Reverting to TB24 may be the most productive temporary work-around.

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/

This a community self-help forum. It is rare for Mozilla staff to appear here. If this support delivery model doesn't suit you, then you probably do need to find an alternative mail client.

I just discovered by accident how to get around the Group problem.

1. Open Address Book in Thunderbird; 2. Select desired group; 3. Click on "Write" button in Address Book.

This will open a message window with all group members listed as recipients.

OK, so you have all the List's members listed explicitly and they are all in the To: field. You would, I hope, consider if they ought to be addressed as Bcc:

And this doesn't help with Reply or Forward. Or if there are more than the limit of approx 60 addresses as described earlier.

Are you also telling us that there's a problem when using a List in lieu of an email address?

Thanks for identifying this workaround. However, it is fairly cumbersome for users who have taken the time to build many lists. Another example, I guess, of too much haste in changing things.

I found that making the group name one word it was recognized as a group. However the problem was fixed with update 31.1 and remains fixed with 31.1.2

Not entirely correct. It sometimes recognizes lists with spaces in the name; other times it still requires taking the space out and making it one word--at least for me.

Forgot to mention that I am using 32.0.3

Firefox 32.0.3 Thunderbird 31.1.2

Correct. Sorry about the mixup.