Thunderbird - Move Collected Address to Personal Adress Book

[ChrisGreaves]

I'm running Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 and have accumulated a couple of hundred addresses.
Does anyone know of a neat (i.e. low-cost, low-time) method of selecting a few of the Collected Addresses and moving them to the Personal Address Book.
If I could do that i could then flush my collected addresses list.
Thanks

[HansV]

Can't you just drag-and-drop them in the Address Book window?

[Bigaldoc]

I don't remember about the TB 1.x version, but I run 2.0.0.24 and YES, one can drag addresses from one list to another. That process COPIES them but does not erase them from the original list. Entries can then (ctrl selection) be erased in groups or ctrl-a in their entirety.

The only anomaly that I'm familiar with about the TB address book is that when you delete one or more addresses, they seem not to disappear until you leave and then come back whence you'll find them gone.

Good luck with it, Chris.

[ChrisGreaves]

Can't you just drag-and-drop them in the Address Book window?

yes. Thanks for the KIIB, Hans.

I suspect I tried a month ago to right-click, and then tried a right-click drag to MOVE them, and failed.
As Al points out, one can COPY but not MOVE with the mouse.
Oh well, that will have to do.

I can COPY each address as I find I need it, then flush the collection at the start of each month to keep it down to a manageable size.

[ChrisGreaves]

Can't you just drag-and-drop them in the Address Book window?

I've seen my problem.
I had been trying to drag-and-drop during the message composition phase.
I'd choose to Write a message, find that the address was not in the Personal Address Book, locate it in the Collected Addresses and immediately try to drag it to the drop-down list box near the top-left corner of the Window.
That won't work.
One has to be outside the composition window to drag-and-drop addresses.

[Bigaldoc]

Oh boy, thanks for leaving that note!

[jonwallace]

I suppose one way would be to export your address books as csv or tab-delimited files and use excel or something (OOo Calc) to edit them all about and re-import them to thunderbird.

[ChrisGreaves]

I suppose one way would be to export ... and re-import them to Thunderbird.

Thanks Jon, It's a thought.

A quick experiment shows that they are in easily-interpreted text format (multi-line records in Notepad), and a simple Import leaves with me "Personal", "Collected" and my edited "Coll", that is, Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 doesn't seem to offer a replacement facility, so I'd have to delete the personal and replace it with an import.

I suspect I'm just as well off doing what I wanted to do, (and doing it in the right place and at the right time), that is, drag-and-drop each time the Collected Addresses gets above a certain size e.g. one screenful.