How to add multiple email ids in bulk together into new list

[Swarup]

Using TB in Ubuntu.

Say I have 100 email addresses, and I want to create a new list and add the 100 email addresses into the list. Do I have to paste each one individually into the list, or is there a way to add/paste all 100 email id's simultaneously? This would save me a lot of time.

I tried pasting the 100 email addresses together, but they just paste into the first line of the list; they do not populate separately as different entries in the list, as they should.

[tanstaafl]

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mailing_lists

Its simplest to create a mailing list, close the dialog box for the mailing list you just created, and then drag and drop contacts from the same address book to the mailing list.

[Swarup]

That is still quite laborious. It means one first has to add all the email addresses in as individual contacts. And then one has to drag and drop them individually into the mailing list. If there are a lot of addresses, and/or if there are numerous lists to be created, this is quite time intensive and can be quite confusing to keep track of as the lists are being made.

TB is otherwise so good, there should be a way to add multiple email addresses in bulk, dump them into the list. Would have thought this would be a routine feature. Really surprising this was never developed as a standard.

[tanstaafl]

I assumed you already had the addresses as contacts in the address book. If you have mail messages that have that address (in the from, to or cc header) you can click on the adjacent star icon in the message header and have it create a contact, using that information.

You could create a .csv or .ldif formatted text file with the addresses and import it using tools -> import in the address book window. But that is probably more work than just adding them manually.

[sfhowes]

You don't say where the 100 addresses are, but it looks like they are in a text file or spreadsheet outside of TB. In that case, import them as a text file or csv file to TB as an address book, and then you can copy or move them into another address book and create a mailing list as explained in the previous post. Drag and drop in Address Book works with multiple contacts.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_addres ... _text_file

If the 100 addresses are recipients of a received message, there is a way to add them to an address book or mailing list, with an add-on.

[Swarup]

Yes, there were actually around 300 addresses in a text file. I tried to paste them into the list, but you know what happens when you do that, they just all paste together into the first line of the list which is useless. So this morning I pasted them all one by one individually into the list.

I'll never do that again! Now I see that in the import menu one can select just the address book, and then opt for .txt. I didn't try it yet. I assume this means if I have say 200 addresses listed on separate lines in a text file, I can import them this way and TB will make it into an address book? But still, the last step-- that of going from "address book" to "list" still sounds labor intensive to me. Can I drag the whole address book into the list? Or do I have to drag and drop each member of the address book into the list separately?

Just read the thread referred to in the link you gave. I had a question about the below:

My .txt file had about 50 email addresses, with one address per line and no other information. To import, I went Tools > Import > Address Book, selected Text File, then selected the file to import as "Tab Delimited (*.tab. *.txt)", un-checked all address fields except Primary Email, and hit the OK button. This imported all the addresses into a new address book with the same name as my original text file. To make a new mailing list from here, all you have to do is create a blank list and drag all the imported addresses (cards) into it.

Here at the end it says "all you have to do is create a blank list and drag all the imported addresses (cards) into it". Does this get done in bulk? If so, how does one drag them? Can one highlight all the addresses in the address book and drag them together? Or how do the "cards" get brought over in bulk?

[tanstaafl]

You can select all of them and then drag and drop them in one step.

[Swarup]

Ok, that is very helpful to hear! I will try it.

[Swarup]

A related question: As mentioned, I created by hand today a list of 300 email addresses. But I found out that my server will not post more than one hundred bcc at one time. So I need to divide the list into three separate lists. What is the best way to do this?

[sfhowes]

Import the 300 to an address book, then create 3 mailing lists, adding 100 to each one.

[Swarup]

Import the 300 to an address book, then create 3 mailing lists, adding 100 to each one.

I went to tools => import => select the type of material to import => opted for "address books" => selected form .txt => the browser window that opens says it is looking for an "address book file". Even though I have a text file in the folder I browse to, and in the text file are the addresses, but the browser window doesn't see the text files at all. It doesn't show any files that are meeting the requirements for being able to be imported.