Welcome to the Spoken Tutorial on Address Book in Mozilla Thunderbird
In this tutorial we will learn how to add, view, modify and delete contacts from the Address Book.
We will also learn how to:
Create a New Address Book.
Delete an existing Address Book.
Import contacts from other mail accounts.
Here we are using Mozilla Thunderbird 13.0.1 on Ubuntu 12.04.
What is an Address Book?
An address book works the same way as the Contacts feature in your mobile phone.
You can use the Address Book to create and maintain contacts.
There are two types of Address Books in Thunderbird:
Personal address book allows you to create new contacts.
Collected address book automatically collects the email addresses from outgoing or sent mails.
Click on the Thunderbird icon in the Launcher.
The Thunderbird window opens.
Now, let’s learn to add contacts in the Personal Address Book.
From the Main menu, click on Tools and Address Book.
The Address Book dialog box appears.
In the left panel, you can see both the Personal and Collected Address Books.
By default the Personal Address Book is selected in the left panel.
The right panel is divided into two halves.
The top half displays the contacts.
The bottom half displays the complete details of the contact selected at the top.
Let’s create a new contact.
In the toolbar, click New Contact.
The New Contact dialog box appears.
Click the Contact tab.
Let’s enter First as AMyNewContact.
Enter Email as USERONE at GMAIL dot COM
Note that the field Display Name is automatically updated with the First Name.
Click the Private tab. Use this tab to store the complete postal address for the contact.
You can use the Work, Other and Photo tabs to store relevant information and even the photograph of the contact.
Click OK.
The contact is added and displayed in the right panel.
In the same manner let’s add two more contacts VMyNewContact and ZMyNewContact.
Let’s suppose we want to sort contacts by name.
From the Main Menu, click on View, Sort by and Name.
Notice, that the contacts are sorted in the ascending order, by default.
To sort it in the ascending order, from the Main Menu, click on View, Sort by and Ascending.
Alternately, in the Address Book dialog box, from the right panel, simply click on Name.
The names are now sorted in the descending order!
Now, let’s search for a contact.
We can search for a contact using the Name or the By Email.
Let’s search for the name AMyNewContact.
Go to the Address Book dialog box.
In the Search field, enter AMyNewContact.
Notice, the Search field.
Instead of the Magnifying glass icon, a small cross icon is displayed.
Only the contact AMyNewContact is displayed in the top right panel.
Now, in the Search field, click the cross icon.
All the contacts are now visible in the top right panel.
Pause this tutorial and do this assignment.
Search for emails by Subject.
Suppose the contact information for ZMyContact has changed.
Can we edit this information? Yes, we can!
From the right panel, let’s select ZMyNewContact.
Now, right click for the context menu and select Properties.
The Edit Contact For ZMyNewContact dialog box appears.
Let’s change the name to MMyNewContact.
Now, let’s change the Field Display Name to MMyNewContact.
We shall also add a Work Title and Department.
Click the Work tab.
In the Title enter Manager and in Department enter HR.Click OK.
Look at the contact details in the bottom right panel.It has been updated.
Now, how can we delete unwanted contacts in Thunderbird?
First, select the Contact.
Right-click to view the context menu and click Delete.
A confirmation dialog box appears.Click OK.
The contact is deleted and is no longer displayed on the contact list.
Thunderbird also allows you to create your own address book.
This is in addition to the two default books, that is, Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses.
Let’s create a new Address Book.
Remember, you must keep the Address Book dialog box open.
From the Main menu, go to File, click New and select Address Book.
The New Address Book dialog box appears.
In the Address Book Name field, type Office Contacts.Click OK
The address book we created is displayed in the left panel.
You can use this address book in the same manner you use the default address books.
Pause this tutorial and do this assignment.
Create a new Address Book and add contacts to it.
Next, let’s learn to delete an Address Book.
Remember, when you delete an address book all the contacts associated with it are also deleted.
To delete the address book Office Contacts from the left panel select it.
Right-click to view the context menu and select Delete.
A dialog box requesting you to confirm the delete action appears.Click OK.
The address book is deleted.
Pause this tutorial and do this assignment.
Create a new address book called Additional Office Contacts.
Use the Edit option in the Address Book toolbar
Delete this address book.
From the Main menu in the Address Book dialog box, select Edit and Search Addresses.
Use the Advanced Search option to search for addresses.
Thunderbird allows us to import contacts from other Mail accounts too.
This way we can update the contacts without losing contact information.
Let’s import the contacts from our Gmail account.
First we open the Gmail account.
Open a fresh browser and the type the url www.gmail.com.Press Enter.
The Gmail home page appears.
Enter the Username as STUSERONE at gmail dot com. Enter your password.
Click Sign In. The Gmail window appears.
For the purposes of this tutorial we have created four contacts in Gmail.
From the top-left of the Gmail window, click on GMail and Contacts.
The Contacts tab appears.
Click More and select Export.
The Export contacts dialog box appears.
In the field Which contacts do you want to export?, select All contacts.
In the field Which export format?, select Outlook CSV format. Click Export.
The Opening contacts.csv dialog box appears.
Select Save File. Click OK.
The Downloads dialog box appears.
This is the default folder in which the document is saved.
The file is saved as contacts.csv in the default Downloads folder.
Close the Downloads dialog box.
From the Main menu, click Tools and select Import.
The Import dialog box appears.
Select Address Books. Click Next.
From the Select type of file list, click on Text file. Click Next.
Browse to Downloads folder.
Click the Select which types of files are shown button and select All Files.
Select contacts.csv.Click Open.
The Import Address Book dialog box appears.
Ensure that the box First record contains field names is checked.
In this tutorial, we shall check and match only the First Name, Last Name and Primary Email fields
And uncheck all the other fields from the left side
The First Name on the left is already aligned with the First Name on the right.
You must use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to match Mozilla Thunderbird Address Book fields column on the left
with Gmail Record data to import column on the right.
Let’s select Last Name field on the left and click the Move Down button.
Notice, that the Last Name on the Address Book fields column and the Last Name on the Record data to import column are now aligned.
Now, select Primary Email, and click on the Move Down button until it is aligned to E-mail Address. Click OK.
A message that the address book has been imported is displayed. Click Finish.
The Gmail Address Book is imported to Thunderbird.
In the left panel of the Address Book dialog box, a new folder contacts has been added.
Click on contacts.
The First Names along with the email address are displayed.
We have imported the Gmail address book to Thunderbird!
Close the Address Book by clicking on the red cross on the top left corner of the dialog box.
Finally, log out of Thunderbird. From the Main menu, click File and Quit.
This brings us to the end of this tutorial on Thunderbird.
In this tutorial we learnt how to add, view, modify and delete contacts from the Address Book. We also learnt how to:
Create a New Address Book.
Delete an existing Address Book.
Import contacts from other mail accounts.
Here is an assignment for you.
Create a new address book
Add and view contacts
Import contacts from your personal email ID to your Thunderbird account.
Select and match all the fields while importing the address book.
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