We need to know whether this is an address book or a Mailing List.

Does it look like a subfolder of another address book?

How do you go about adding addresses to a message?

So if I go to my address book hierarchy, I see (DownArrow)(BlueBook)All AddressBook

   (DownArrow)(BlueBook) Personal AddressBook
                                    (People) MainContactList
                                    (People) InternalContactTeam
     (DownArrow)(BlueBook) BaseShopContact
     (DownArrow)(BlueBook) Collected Address

That is the best way I can put it for you. I guess it is a subfolder or another addressbook? I import it from my google contact.

BaseShopContact is an address book, on a par with Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses. In contrast, MainContactList is a Mailing List, similar to the "group" concept in other email programs.

You didn't answer my other question.

• Many users want to see the address book and click on Contacts to add them. They generally use the Contacts Sidebar in the Write window. You should be able to select this imported address book in the Contacts Sidebar; look for the drop-down list control at the top.

• Some of us just start typing in part of a Contact's name or address and let autocompletion do all the looking up.

I think that for convenience you should open this BaseShopContact address book, create a new Mailing List ("group", if you will) inside it and add all the members of the BaseShopContact address book to the new Mailing List. Then you can just type the name of this new Mailing List to have it added to a message, and set its addressing to "Bcc:".

Note that a Mailing List can properly only include Contacts found in its parent address book. A Mailing List is just a collection or subset of the parent or host address book. Accordingly, if you add a new Contact to a Mailing List, it will also create a new entry for this Contact in the parent address book. So if you wanted your BaseShopContact item to appear as a Mailing List inside Personal Address Book, it would be advisable to move or copy all of its member Contacts into Personal Address Book first.

I have never tried setting up a Mailing List with the same name as another Mailing List or address book; I don't know if there would be any difficulty in resolving what you wanted in the face of the possible ambiguity.

Zenos, Thanks for your response. So, is there a way I can do a bulk copy of the addressbook BaseShopContact and create a mailing list? The sole purpose of have this BaseShopContact addressbook that I imported is I want to have a mailing list. From your description, I have to type it out one at a time which is not user friendly. Is there another way, I can create a mailing list from a CSV file I have instead it import to be a addressbook?

Bottomline, is how do I get the list of people in the addressbook BaseShopContact into a mailing list?

You still haven't answered my question about how you address your messages. If you use auto-complete, it searches all your address books and so doesn't matter where a Mailing List is located. You just start typing the Mailing List's name.

If you want to pick it from a display then you'll need to select the appropriate address book, or re-create it in the preferred address book.

In principle you drag-and-drop to move contacts from one address book to another. Open the source, select, drag and drop onto the target's icon. Hold down ctrl whilst drag-and-dropping and it copies rather than moves. But I have to say that of late drag-and-drop has been rather erratic and unreliable and I have been unable to rehearse successfully to check how I would describe it to you. :-(

You could resort to editing CSV files and that would offer a way to combine separate address books. The problem is that when you import a CSV file, it creates a new address book rather than modifying an existing one.

You might be able to fudge around this by exporting your address books to CSV files, combine them in your spreadsheet or text editor and then import to a new address book. Now close Thunderbird, rename or move abook.mab and rename the newly-created address book's data file to abook.mab. Now your newly combined set of Contacts will appear in Personal Address Book. I think that then you could select all the members of the original BaseShopContact address book and drag and drop them onto a new Mailing List in Personal Address Book.

Caution! This renaming of abook.mab is a thought experiment. I haven't tried it for myself yet.