Often, we send the same email messages to a particular group of contacts from your address book. This may include a work email to all the colleagues or a get-together message to your group of friends. In such cases, it might be helpful to group those contacts together. So you don’t have to manually add each email address every time you have to send a group email.
Thunderbird Mailing Lists
Thunderbird’s built-in feature called Mailing list. It will help you easily do that and each group of contacts is called a mailing list.
To create a new mailing list:
- Go to Address Book
- Go to File → New → Mailing List, and give the appropriate name such as “work,” “friends,” “travel group,” etc.
- Now you can add email addresses manually (one address per line)
- Or, close the window by clicking on “OK” and go back to the Address book. Here, you can select the contacts already on your address book and drag them to the mailing list on the left pane.
To send an email to a mailing list, here’s the method 1:
- Open your address book and select the mailing list you want to send an email to.
- Click “Write” and the new “compose email” window will open up. All the contacts on your selected mailing list will appear in the “to” field.
- Note that you may want to manually move the contacts to CC or BCC if you so wish.
Another method is to start by writing a new email and then add the mailing list:
- Click the “write” button to compose a new email
- On the left “Address Book,” select the mailing list you want to send the email to
- Note that if the address book is not visible, you can use f9 or View → Contacts Sidebar to bring it up.
- This method allows to select a whole mailing list as To, Cc, or BCC. But once selected, you cannot remove any specific email address individually (That’s the primary difference between this and the method 1 above).
One point to remember if there are two email addresses with the same name (though different domain), you cannot move them to your mailing list by simple drag-and-drop method. One way to go around the problem is to change their name temporarily, move them to the mailing list, and then change the name back to the original one.
Now you don’t have to worry about adding each email address individually anytime you want to send a same message to the same set of people.
It saves a lot of time and helps you improve productivity, particularly if your work is heavily dependent on sending a lot of emails every day.