Comma or Semi-colon to Send Mail to Multiple Recipients

[lancerocke]

I'm trying to send mail to multiple recipients by typing a partial name in, seeing the intended recipient, clicking on that name, then typing a comma or semi-colon to put in the next name the same way, but when i type the comma or semi-colon, the address line becomes red, and doesn't continue suggesting the address of the next partially typed in name. I would do this in Outlook with no problem. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance for any help

[DanRaisch]

Thunderbird does not support auto-completion of more than one email address per line. You can enter multiple addresses, separated by commas, but only the first will generate auto-complete suggestions.

[lancerocke]

Thunderbird does not support auto-completion of more than one email address per line. You can enter multiple addresses, separated by commas, but only the first will generate auto-complete suggestions.

yikes. that's terrible. im sure noone care, but this might be the one reason i cant make the switch from outlook. is that an add-on there i can use?

[DanRaisch]

Not that I'm aware of but you can use a different procedure. While in the composition window press F9 (or use menu path View->Contact Sidebar). Use Ctrl+click to select all of the names you wish to send the message to and then click on "To:" or "CC:" or "BCC:" to address the message. You can do that separately for each of type of addressee (To:, CC:, BCC:) as Thunderbird clears the selections when you click on the button to add the addresses to the message.

[lancerocke]

Not that I'm aware of but you can use a different procedure. While in the composition window press F9 (or use menu path View->Contact Sidebar). Use Ctrl+click to select all of the names you wish to send the message to and then click on "To:" or "CC:" or "BCC:" to address the message. You can do that separately for each of type of addressee (To:, CC:, BCC:) as Thunderbird clears the selections when you click on the button to add the addresses to the message.

i just tried the F9 method. what it lacks is the option to choose which e-mail address from that contact that. i also don't have any add-ons installed and it seems very buggy. i chose a contact who i confirmed had an e-mail address on file, and it refused to add the contact to 'to' column, where it let me add others.
again, im sure noone cares, and im not trying to be a troll, but this one thing has forced me to uninstall Thunderbird. I can't make the switch

[DanRaisch]

OK. Not a problem.

[lancerocke]

i now realize the reason the e-mail address wasn't being added was because the contact didn't have a primary e-mail stored, and only a secondary e-mail. that shouldn't matter though. where is the option to chose which e-mail to send to from the contacts panel?

[Guest]

I think there is a bug open [Bug 440377] for this single line address completion. Not sure if/when it will ever get fixed. The whole address box field design in TB is absolutely horrible IMHO. It wastes precious real-estate space on the screen. If I were to send email to multiple address, managing them by scrolling up/down method is just plain bad IMHO. I use a LDAP server for addresses and it make it even worse, not to have the ability to add/look up multiple address in the address box. But this is all one person's opinion.

[lancerocke]

I think there is a bug open [Bug 440377] for this single line address completion. Not sure if/when it will ever get fixed. The whole address box field design in TB is absolutely horrible IMHO. It wastes precious real-estate space on the screen. If I were to send email to multiple address, managing them by scrolling up/down method is just plain bad IMHO. I use a LDAP server for addresses and it make it even worse, not to have the ability to add/look up multiple address in the address box. But this is all one person's opinion.

its a tragedy really. the app is great. this just seems like something that obviously needs to be taken care of like yesterday. im not here to troll or anything, but i just really want to switch from outlook

[DanRaisch]

Agreed, the address book in Thunderbird is a significantly weak element of the program. There were posts before the release of version 3.0 that suggested that work had been started on updating the address book to use a new database but those was either inaccurate or over-optimistic about the timing for such an update.

On the other hand, Thunderbird is an email client and is not intended to be a replacement for Outlook which is closer to a PIM than just an email client.

If you try using the functionality in Thunderbird for a while you may find that it is a matter of getting used to a different way of working. It works...just not the way you are used to.