Mail List issue when using the same email address

[brundleflyguy]

Hi there,
I have a problem getting the address book to work when I have two people who share the same email address. For instance, I have a Bob and Sally Snerd. Their email address is thesnerds@snerd.com but they like to receive emails with their own name in the display field. So I created two contacts: one with Bob Snerd in the display name and one with Sally Snerd, but both with the same email address. Most of the time, that seems to work, but when I add these two names to a mailing list, things go badly.

When I click on the list and choose Edit, the names show up properly, but when I just left click on the list, then the names in the right-hand pane change to whomever I added last to the list. In order words:

If I add Sally Snerd, then Bob Snerd, they show up properly under Edit List, but in the right-hand pane, they both show up as Bob Snerd.

How can I convince Thunderbird that they are two separate contacts and show them properly?

Thanks!

[DanRaisch]

As far as I am aware, you can't. The mailing list is not a separate data set but only a displayed subset of the contacts in the address book and the only key to uniqueness is the email address. That means as far as the mailing list is concerned, both the Sally Snerd and the Bob Snerd address book entries are the same contact.

[brundleflyguy]

The odd thing is that in the Edit/List window, it shows correctly. It's only in the right pane (and apparently in emails) that it shows incorrectly, which makes me think it's a bug rather than a feature.

[DanRaisch]

Not suggesting it as a feature but neither is it a bug, per se. Thunderbird can't tell the difference between those two contact records because they have the same email address. There is no provision for dealing with that. "That means as far as the mailing list is concerned, both the Sally Snerd and the Bob Snerd address book entries are the same contact."
The situation can be handled when entering addresses into the "To:" field because the auto-completion algorithm looks at the name fields as well as the address field. That doesn't happen when using a mailing list.

[tanstaafl]

Most email providers seem to support plus addressing, if only because Gmail supports it. It's a slight risk (though I've never run into a problem using plus addressing) but you could could try using thesnerds+Sally@snerd.com and thesnerds+Bob@snerd.com as the email addresses. Both will be stored in the same mailbox by your email provider (it automatically ignores the +Bob and +Sally strings unless you have Bob and Sally child folders for the inbox) when it receives a message, but they should be treated as separate email addresses by Thunderbird.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2- ... -your.html

[DanRaisch]

The plus address does work in a mailing list and show up in incoming messages using that technique but to make the distinct addressee visible, the Snerds would want to have the "Recipient" field visible in the message list display (if they are using Thunderbird). Otherwise the intended recipient would not be identifiable until the message was opened for display.

Alternatively they could create sub-folders of the main Inbox and use filters to move messages received with the plus addressing so each would have their own, separate "Inbox" folder.