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Addressing to multiple recipients no longer works

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  • 13 have this problem
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  • Last reply by tonicuea

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Addressing to multiple recipients no longer works. It worked until the latest update. Now I can no longer send messages using my personal address book multiple recipients feature. I have several set up and been using them for years. Suddenly (discovered today 10 Sept 2014) I get the error message "To: (name of Group) is not a valid email address because it is not of the form user@host. You must correct it before sending the email". Anyone have any idea how to resolve this. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird and closed down and restarted my computer all to no avail.

Addressing to multiple recipients no longer works. It worked until the latest update. Now I can no longer send messages using my personal address book multiple recipients feature. I have several set up and been using them for years. Suddenly (discovered today 10 Sept 2014) I get the error message "To: (name of Group) is not a valid email address because it is not of the form user@host. You must correct it before sending the email". Anyone have any idea how to resolve this. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird and closed down and restarted my computer all to no avail.

Chosen solution

I think this is a bug in Thunderbird 31 and there's a fix in Thunderbird 32. You could roll back to an earlier version.

The fault may be triggered by spaces in the name or description in a Mailing List ; replace them by underscore or, it has been suggested, %20.

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Chosen Solution

I think this is a bug in Thunderbird 31 and there's a fix in Thunderbird 32. You could roll back to an earlier version.

The fault may be triggered by spaces in the name or description in a Mailing List ; replace them by underscore or, it has been suggested, %20.

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Thank you Zenos. I downloaded and installed the 32 beta verion and whilst it cured the problem complained of it created another. My address book in version 32 is in no order what-so-ever and although I can correct this in the 'view' and 'sort by' options of the address book and doing so puts them in order the list reverts to its random unsorted state as soon as the window is closed. In the contacts pane of the 'wite' window the addresses are all over the place and nothing I do will put them in any semblance of order. Fortuantely I had an older version of Thunderbird 24.2.0 (Jan 14) saved and have reinstalled that. That works perfectly.

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For future reference, old versions can be found here:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/

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Thanks for your help. Much appreciated.

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I am running Thunderbird v31.2.0 and was running into the same problem. I was able to work around it by replacing all the semicolons in the list of email addresses with commas.

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Aserio, that's working exactly as intended.

The preferred way to address multiple recipients is to use multiple address boxes, one addressee per box. In other words, use the <return> key as the address separator.

Your method defeats autocomplete and is largely incompatible with selecting addressees from the Address Book. One exception to this is that if you select multiple addressees in the Contacts Sidebar and then drag-and-drop them onto an address box, they will stack in line, with commas. But in this case, having been selected from your address book, they can be assumed to have been validated. In other cases, each stand-alone address (one per line) can be validated by comparison with your Address Book, and unknown or potentially incorrect addresses (maybe mis-typed?) are shown in red. (That's the theory; in practice Thunderbird tends to show good addresses in red too. :-( )

The original complaint referred to a new bug which caused Thunderbird to fail to recognize Mailing Lists, similar to distribution lists in other email clients. In general, if Thunderbird rejects a Mailing List as an invalid email address, it's an indication of a corrupt address book data file.

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No I didn't try. I unistall evertthinh. Did you try ? Just a list of recipient like this

name@example.com, pippo@mona.com, magna@semo.com, nick_mason@pinkfloyd.com,

copy and paste in a,ccor ccn with 24.6 ... comme mean a semaration so each line corresponds correctly to an email address. In 31 not or better it creates

name@example.com ,pippo@mona.com ,magna@semo.com ,nick_mason@pinkfloyd.com

With obvious errors when you send them !!

https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1019067

If I don't put comma it creates by itself !!!

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I'd like to try to understand a use case for typing in email addresses. How do you guard against mistakes?

If the list is computer generated, then you need to make sure the list is compatible with the target application.

Thunderbird understands commas as address separators, and it recognizes linefeeds as address separators. Use either, but not both together.

Any attempt to paste data from one application to another means that you must understand the expectations, requirements and limitations of both applications.

A tip; do your paste then hit the return key.

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Zenos said

I'd like to try to understand a use case for typing in email addresses. How do you guard against mistakes?

I don't know about tonicuea, but I have a file with several lists of email address for different projects that I am coordinating. In order to send an email to a particular group I copy all the email addresses in that list and paste them into one line. (typing each in individually would take too long)

I just found and replaced all the semicolons with commas in my lists of emails, but it is kind of annoying as using a semicolon as an delineator is a standard .

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And you store your lists as lines? I'd do it one per line. Anyhow, any decent editor would make it trivial to do a global search and replace on the semicolons.

But why use an external file when you have a perfectly adequate address book built in, and with Mailing Lists, specifically designed for your scenario?

(Yes, I'd use a file if I was being given harvested one-use addresses for cold call messages where I'd never expect to contact those addresses a second time. But I'd like to think that I'd never stoop so low as to become involved in anything that spammy.)

As an aside, IIRC, as far as the Internet and mail protocols are concerned, commas are the actual separators used for multiple email addresses. Microsoft in their typical way have obfuscated and complicated the situation because behind the scenes they must be swapping your semicolons for commas when you use them in Outlook.

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Zenos said

I'd like to try to understand a use case for typing in email addresses. How do you guard against mistakes? If the list is computer generated, then you need to make sure the list is compatible with the target application. Thunderbird understands commas as address separators, and it recognizes linefeeds as address separators. Use either, but not both together. Any attempt to paste data from one application to another means that you must understand the expectations, requirements and limitations of both applications. A tip; do your paste then hit the return key.

Yes I do, the problem is with TB 31 not precedent version ... I test ... it doesn't accept any separator !!!

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aserio said

Zenos said
I'd like to try to understand a use case for typing in email addresses. How do you guard against mistakes?

I don't know about tonicuea, but I have a file with several lists of email address for different projects that I am coordinating. In order to send an email to a particular group I copy all the email addresses in that list and paste them into one line. (typing each in individually would take too long)

I just found and replaced all the semicolons with commas in my lists of emails, but it is kind of annoying as using a semicolon as an delineator is a standard .

not undesrtand but as you see it doesn't work ! It is a bug !!!

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Zenos said

And you store your lists as lines? I'd do it one per line. Anyhow, any decent editor would make it trivial to do a global search and replace on the semicolons. But why use an external file when you have a perfectly adequate address book built in, and with Mailing Lists, specifically designed for your scenario? (Yes, I'd use a file if I was being given harvested one-use addresses for cold call messages where I'd never expect to contact those addresses a second time. But I'd like to think that I'd never stoop so low as to become involved in anything that spammy.) As an aside, IIRC, as far as the Internet and mail protocols are concerned, commas are the actual separators used for multiple email addresses. Microsoft in their typical way have obfuscated and complicated the situation because behind the scenes they must be swapping your semicolons for commas when you use them in Outlook.

becuse these are not resident mailing list BUT they chane cosntnuosly ! So I ask Mozilla to bring back the function working as it was. It is not a great demand !!!!

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Also in the version 31.5.0 this bug is still present ! TH is going to be worst any further version ! I am stuck on 24.6 !!!