The 'All Addresses' is NOT a separate address book. It is a compilation of all the entries from all of the Address Books. If a contact is in multiple address books they will have several entries in the address panel. It even includes mailing lists.

Click in the address panel and press a letter and you are taken to that section of the book(s). Right click on any entry and you can write a message. Click on a group name and send to a list.

If you have the screen space, you can add a new column to the Thread Pane called 'Address Book'. It shows the name of the book that has that contact. You can see the duplicates, and decide which to delete.

TB-38.2 Win-PC

How to arrange Personal Address book to come up with new "write".

You can not do it until Thunderbird is given the capability to remember you selection. All it does now, or ever did was select the first entry n the list.

A bug has been filesd and when a patch is made it will be released. Until then your will just have to select the address book.

As an aside, perhaps if your seeing all sorts of rubbish in your address book, you need to clean out your other address books. The mail addresses captured in Collected addresses for instance can be turned off if you do not want to see them.

The "Personal Address Book" used to work fine until a few months ago (not exactly sure the last version that did work correctly).