IMHO, the Contacts Sidebar needs the following options :

Open to the address book I used last time Open to a nominated address book regardless of what I used last time

Having said that, I rarely use this Sidebar. My brain is happier with typing in part of an address and letting the autofill provide matches from my address books. It seems to me to be much smarter to let the computer do the looking up, rather than me picking through a list.

What's your workflow? What sort of situation leads to picking from a list being an attractive or efficient methodology? Do you routinely write to large groups of correspondents? (I don't.) Or do your thought processes simply work better with the visual simulation of the list of Contacts?

Thanks for your suggestions Zenos. I will take a look at addressing as you suggest but I would also like for the program to work as it always has. To this end, how do I get to the Contacts Sidebar options you suggested? I'm not finding them under the program options. Can you please provide directions on how to get to the options you provided?

Thanks.

Ah, no I was just adding to your wishlist. I don't know of any current settings to control which address book appears by default. Sorry to have raised your hopes.

I just noticed this-maybe the latest "upgrade"? I DO often select large numbers of recipients and I do not prefer typing in part of an email for single recipients, as many/most of mine are not intuitive (ghostrider45678 or some such thing, unlike my work email).

Every time I close and reopen Thunderbird it reselects "All Address Books" which includes "collected" addresses (which I did not want or enable ANYWAY). This looks like about 500 or more addresses; many look useless anyway, appearing to be from mass mail servers.)

PLEASE let there be a solution! PERSONAL ADDRESS BOOK AS DEFAULT or ONLY address book!

Short term solution-

I deleted my "Collected" Addresses by selecting one and "CTL+A" (Select All) and deleted them. The only worry I had was if it would also delete the FEW that were actually valid and current but cross posted in my Personal Address Book but it DID NOT.

So now, even though it still opens as "All Address Books". it only shows the GOOD email addresses that I actually use.

Still...we need a better way-ideally a way to select which one we want to ALWAYS start with, even after restart or launch.