Transferring tousands of contacts

[petergo]

g'day

I am running TB 52.3.0 and win 10 pro

I want to change ISP but have been with them for 15 years plus and collected thousands of contacts , persoanl, business and subscriptions over the years.

When I try to email a large number of them, copied to a group, it does not work because my ISP limits the number to 50 only.

With thousand so contacts to advise of a new email address, may I kindly ask if I can use TB to let let all my contacts know I have a new email address in ONE go please?

thanks kindly, cheers
peter

[tanstaafl]

Do they support exporting your address book as a .csv file? Many webmail implementations do. You can import that in Thunderbird using tools -> import. You may have to adjust the column format (either using the user interface in the import window or by editing it using a spreadsheet beforehand) to match what Thunderbird expects.

If they don't, see if they support the CardDAV protocol for remotely sharing/storing contacts. You could import the contacts using the CardBook add-on if they have a CardDAV server and its configured to store your contacts.

[makaiguy]

Am I understanding correctly? Your question is not about transferring your contacts to a new installation, but rather about notifying all your contacts of your new address and coping with an ISP limit of 50 addresses per message?

If so, you could do this with the Mail Merge extension. Write your message, address it to all your contacts (or to a mail list you create for all your contacts or some subset of them) then have Mail Merge send individual messages to everyone. It will take a while to complete at a second or two per message.

I don't know if TBird has limits on how many addresses it can handle at once. I've used Mail Merge with mail lists of over 350 addresses.

Check whether your ISP also has a limit on how many messages you can send in an hour (I have one that limits me to 500/hour). If so, you can tell Mail Merge to delay X seconds between messages. Set X to (3600 sec/hr) / (mgs/hr). I'd use a slighly lower msg/hr figure in your calculation than they tell you to give youself a little leeway.

[petergo]

thank you for your suggestions

I have got as far as making a csv file from the address book, and reading articles on mail merge, but it seems to be beyond my pay grade.
Firstly the excel worksheet has a gazillion empty cells whether first or last name, and many cells have weird things in them
Next I don't understand the instructions
When I have more free time and life gets less complicated, will study this further
for time being have to leave this problem

but I shant give up or quit <smiles>

cheers
peter