Mozilla Thunderbird Tutorial - Mailing Lists
Mailing lists can be very handy for mailing messages to any group of people, whether it be a group of friends, family members or a number of people at the same company.
To set up a mailing list, follow these simple instructions.
- Open Mozilla Thunderbird.
- Under the Tools menu at the top, click on Address Book.
- When the Address Book opens, click the New List button near the top. The Mailing List window will open.
- Enter a name for your list next to List Name.
- Enter the e-mail addresses for your list in the box below. Enter one address per line.
- When you are done, click OK to save your list.
Your mailing list will appear in your address book along with your other e-mail contacts. A mailing list is selected in the same manner as any other entry in your address book.
When you select a mailing list to send a message to, only the name of the mailing list will appear in the To window in your Thunderbird screen, but keep in mind that anyone receiving the message will see the entire list. If you do not want recipients to see the list, you can select your own e-mail address as the To recipient and select Bcc (blind carbon copy) from the drop-down list on the next recipient line. Type in the first few letters of the name you used for your mailing list and Thunderbird will insert that name in the Bcc field.
To select a mailing list for editing, simply open the Address Book, right-click on the name of the mailing list and select Properties. Pretty simple stuff. 
October 28th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Is there a way to create a mailing list by copying and pasting more than one email at a time? several hundred names at once?
October 30th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
That is exactly what the mailing list feature is there for, but I have never tested it to see if there is a limit to the number of e-mails that you can insert. Several hundred sounds like spam.
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Name your new list per the above and click OK. Then you can drag into your new list from other Thunderbird files the email addresses you want, including several at a time.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I have a very long email list of my club members (400 +) who wish to receive regular emails. I have a lot of trouble with Thunderbird. It does not seem to allow sending of so many emails at once. Also if even one email address has the slightest irregularity it will refuse to send to any recipients and will give an “incorrectly formatted email address” error message. Unfortunately it does not identify the address in question. This is a huge problem and very hard to trouble shoot and fix.
Any suggestions on how to remedy these problems?
April 12th, 2008 at 5:10 am
Hi Miki
I have not been able to find any information about a limit imposed by Thunderbird for the number of e-mail addresses that you can use in a mailing list. However, there is very likely a limit that is imposed to prevent its use by spammers. Although your list is legitimate, you can’t explain that to a software program.
I used to use Eudora and the limit with that was 10. If you tried to send a message to more than 10 e-mail addresses, none of them would go out and there were no error messages indicating that they did not go out.
There is another issue that you may be dealing with. Hosting companies have been installing systems that limit the number of e-mails an account can send within an hour. This is a serious issue with hosting companies because e-mail spammers set up an account and send out millions of spam messages, which typically gets the hosting companies IP addresses added to spam block lists. Check with your hosting company to see if they are imposing an hourly limit.
You might want to experiment with multiple lists with smaller numbers of e-mail addresses in each. I don’t see a way to prevent the problem with invalid e-mail addresses. You will need to review those. Watch for commas used in place of periods. Commas are used to separate e-mails in a list and will probably break any e-mail list when they are used in an e-mail address.
Your best solution might be to look for one of the hundreds of mailing list manager systems that are available. Some of these are installed on your PC, while others are web based.
August 11th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Can anyone, then, recommend a really simple email mass mail program
to use with Thunderbird and the Mac, for handling a list of about
600 - 800 email contacts?
September 29th, 2008 at 12:57 am
I’m new to Thunderbird, and like the correspondent above, having a difficult time with mailing lists. I can’t drag more than one address at a time over, and I’ve got hundreds of them (all of whom have given permission to be on my mailing list, so it’s not spam). It was very simple in Netscape Mail, just drag and drop the names into the list.
I’m also having a difficult time with blind carbon copy. I’m bound by privacy legislation to not disclose the recipients email addresses to others on the list, so I have to use BCC.
September 29th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
If you are going to do mass e-mails, you might want to look into something other than Thunderbird. It is not really designed to do that.
aweber.com is a popular online e-mail management system.