How do you efficently copy recipients from old email to create a new mail/conversation in Thunderbird?

Question

I am specially interested in a solutions for Thunderbird.

Currently I don't know of any efficient way to copy the recipients from an old mail to start a new conversation. As there are currently many ways to do this I will illuminate some (to me most common strategies) and show why I feel those are not very efficient.

Scenario 1: Using the address-book

Ok, there is the address-book which should save you some time as it fast suggest you the recipient and you don't need to type the whole email address. However, even typing in ten recipients will take ages, I want just to copy the whole group and start writing the email. Also there is the danger that I forget some recipient :(

Scenario 2: Edit as new..

• right click on the existing mail with the recipients and then choose: Edit as new..

Then the mail will be attached to the old conversations tree, but I wanted to start a new conversation.

Solution

There is one other method that avoids the conversation-tree problem but has its own defect:

Copy recipients from email source

The source is accessible via Ctrl+u (or View > Message Source). You can copy several email addresses and paste them in the e.g. To-field of a new email. On pressing enter the string is split automatically and spread out in one field per address.

For this string it will work fine:

Alice Test <[email protected]>, Bob Test <[email protected]>

The defect: if there is a newline between Bob Test and <[email protected]>, Bob Test will be extracted to an extra field and sending the email will fail.

Comments

[Daniel R Hicks]

I generally just do "reply to all" and then edit the message to look like a new message. Pretty sure there is a way to put groups into the address book, though, if you send to the same group repeatedly.

[m-ric]

@DanielRHicks that could be problematic because the Message-Id stays the same in your new message. And some mail clients will merge it with your previous email's in a conversation. Edit as new works around this.

[Jasper]

This breaks/doesn't work with encoded recipient names (e.g. umlauts)

[dirdi]

@math asked about Thunderbird. The described procedure works for Outlook only.