The single addresses and mailing lists are two different things. There is no association between the two. If you want the addresses in a mailing lists to change, you have to change the address in the mailing list.

If I change a members email address in the Address Book it doesn’t change in the mailing list which is what I would have expected.

Am I doing something wrong or is this how Thunderbird treats mailing lists ?

Brilliant! I just ran a short (20 name test) with one variation: Tbird3 on OS X recognizes Apple’s Address Book as a data source. Mac users can group your addresses using Address Book’s distribution lists (the leftmost pane in the Address Book window) to create the groupings.

Again, my hat’s off to you, David!

Here’s the procedure:
– Set up individuals in your address book. You don’t need to use the “mailing list” grouping.
– Find a field in the Address Book that you never use (like “Department”)
– Put a value in each person’s “Department” field indicating which mailing lists you’d like them to participate in
– When you want to do a mailing, bring up the address book and sort by “Department”. You’ll see all your mailing list participants in “mailing list” order
– Open a new T’Bird email message compose window
– Set the address field type to “Bcc:” (using pull-down mechanism)
– Highlight as many addresses as you want from the Address book window
– Drag the highligted list, drop it onto the address area of the new mail
– When you let go of the mouse, go get coffee.
– Drink it slowly
– When you come back, you’ll see all the addresses on one line of the email compose window’s address area. Have no fear
– Compose your message
– Hit the send button. Go get more coffee.
– During the send process, all the email addresses will be parsed by T’Bird and you’ll have hundreds of BCC: lines each with one address
– The mail will be sent out with a To: line reading “undisclosed recipients” — and all of your list will get the mail
– If you look in the Sent mailbox, you’ll see the mail recipients all listed in the Bcc: line

You can import and export mailing lists. The following tutorial pretty much covers it:

http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/thunderbird/lists/sharing.html

aweber.com is a popular online e-mail management system.

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.

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.