Drag and drop. Open Collected Addresses, select those you want to move, drag them onto the Personal Address Book icon in the left hand pane.

This works indeed.

But all the contacts I have in personal address book are also in Collected.

If I move all the contacts, I will have hundreds of duplicates. And as far as I know ThunderBird dos not eleiminate duplicates.

If I move only the once that are missing in personal address book, I have to look them all up individually as I cannot see the content of the personal address book besides the content of the collected items.

I generally use the Duplicate Contact Manager add-on to clear up such mess. But Thunderbird shouldn't be adding Contacts to Collected Addresses if they are already in another address book.

So, I would

1. winnow out the unwanted stuff in CA;
2. block copy/move the remainder to PAB or other address book as appropriate;
3. run the Duplicate Contacts add-on.

The way not to get into such a mess is to clean out CA frequently and regularly. I aim to keep mine empty.

Can you detail how to do items 1 and 2?

1. I just look through them. It's usually pretty obvious which ones I don't expect to need again.

2. Do you not know about using shift and control with the mouse to make a multiple selection?

http://xenos-email-notes.simplesite.com/417754237

In the Address Book, you can also use the search/filter box at the top to find contacts with some common denominator.

thank you