Delete it from your address books. All suggestions come from your address book. You have 2 by default. The Personal and the Collected books.

I already deleted them from my addressbooks. They still appear in the drop down menu....

They are still in your Address Book then.

Start a new message addressed to one or more of the incorrect addresses. Save it as a draft. View it in the Drafts folder, where the addressees will be shown in the message header pane. Click on each one, select Edit Contact. You can either delete it immediately, or use Edit Details to correct it.

Hi Zenos, thanks for this. it workedin part, ie for wrong individual addressees. BUT it didn't work for the wrongly named list. IF that's still in my address book, of course I'd just delete it, but IF it's there, it doesn't show up in the contact list, so how can I find it?

re : the wrongly named list.

If you are talking about a 'Mailing List' then this would be located in the 'Address Book'.

Mailing Lists are subfolders to an address book. If an address book (not 'All address Books') has a small arrow to the left of the address book name, then it means it has 'Mailing Lists'. click on that small right pointing arrow to change it to a black arrow and it will then display all the Mailing Lists in that address book.

The badly named lists don't show up among the bunch of lists that the arrow shows up when clicked - only the properly named ones. The wrong ones only show up in the drop down list in the address bar.

do the wrongly names ones have "formatting" like -!@#$%^&*()<>?":

No they don't, Matt. They look pretty normal.

I assume you could provide the names of at least one mailing list. Just to provide a clue.

Sure, Matt. I should have thought of that. When I enter

BIGSupporters  in the address bar - looking for J-O names, I get a drop down list that includes

BIGKSupporterListJ-O <BIGKSupporterListJ-O> which has long been deleted from the Address book

as well as

BIGSupportersJ-O <BIGSupportersJ-O> which is the current proper list.

There are three such problems - all exactly the same, having to do with the mailing lists that start out BIG

All I want and need to do is to get the outdated ones off the drop down lists in the To: line. Since they don't show up in the addressbook at all, I can't ssssimply delete them from there, so need another technique. An earlier technique offered to delete erroneous individual addresses when they appear worked fine, but it doesn't work for lists.

What that previous technique did was give you a way to locate the entries in your address books. ipso faco, we are going to have yo help you work out where in your address book you have them. Because they are there. just as the addresses were.

When you go into your address book. Select View on the menu (alt+V) and then the layout option.

make sure there is a tick against the directory pane entry. In the directory pane select the All address books entry. Click on the Name heading on the lists to the left. That will sort the list alphabetically. If it is starting at Z click it again to reverse the sort

Now when you scroll though that list to the BIG entries, you should see you mailing list, both the wrong and the right ones.

Hi again Matt,

Thanks for sticking with me on this. I've made good progress as a result, though not directly via the route you suggested. I followed all your directions and that ended up showing me where I have always started - ie with the All Address Books panel open all the time to the left of the particular one I'm looking at. So, I always see under "Collected Addresses" all the lists I have, and that's where I went to delete the erroneous ones when I deleted them. They are no longer visible in that Collected Addresses list at all, though the properly addressed current ones are there clearly visible. And that's why I couldn't (I thought) just delete them. But here's what happened. This time, because I'm writing to you, I also checked for the bad lists under "All Contacts" . And weirdly, all the bad lists and none of the good ones were there!!! I never saw them before because that's not where I looked for them, since it wasn't where I had deleted them from. I've now deleted them from all contacts and that has solved the drop down address bar problem entirely. So thanks so much for getting me to this point by hook or crook. But now there's a remaining minor issue. The good lists are not listed in All Contacts at all, only in Collected Contacts. Is there some way I can see to it that they get listed in All Contacts as well? I think the background problem is that I don't understand the relationship between the Collected Addresses List and the All Contacts list since the former doesn't appear in the latter and the bad lists that were in the latter no longer appeared in the former Hope that's clear. Perhaps you could explain that to me as a last gift?

Toni

Wow. 2 days ago I told you to look in the Collected and the personal books. I guess better late than never. All address books is NOT a real address book. Is is just a listing of all your books.

But Airmail, the problem was in the "All Contacts" list, which is where I never looked, not in the Collected or the Personal lists. That's why your suggestion didn't help me.

"All Contacts" is not a standard part of the Thunderbird Address Book. Therefore you put it there, or some action you took in the past, such as synching an online address book, and that you haven't told us about, created it on your behalf.

We can't see your Address Book. We can only go by what you decribe, and if you have added personalised address books, "folders" or Mailing Lists then we have to rely on you knowing they are there.

In my own postings I specifically write Address Book to encompass all the individual address books and Mailing Lists.

You were advised that the offending Contacts are still in your Address Book. If they can't be found in the address books that you have looked in, then they must, surely, be in the remaining address books you haven't yet looked in.

BTW, I recommend not using Collected Addresses as a working address book. Thunderbird puts things in there for you and much of it isn't useful. Create address books that are meaningful to you, and file Contacts into them accordingly. Periodically review the Collected Addresses' contents, File what is useful, dump the rest. Try to keep it empty. (I take the same approach to my Inboxes. Keep them empty. File the useful material under useful categories.)

Do you know where your All Contacts came from?

DumbOldLady said

But Airmail, the problem was in the "All Contacts" list, which is where I never looked, not in the Collected or the Personal lists. That's why your suggestion didn't help me.

As stated All Address Books is NOT a real book. I told you the 2 default books but you seemed to know better.

Hi Zenos and Airmail,

I didn't mean to seem a know-it-all at all! On the contrary, I'm a real dumb old lady when it comes to computer issues! I'm regret I didn't know the things you're telling me here, and caused you so much trouble. I've had Thunderbird for many years and so far as I remember it always had Personal, All contacts, and Collected Addresses as three different lists. Everything was in All Contacts and when I needed to create a list, I'd start typing a contact name and TB would fill in the rest from All Contacts. Apart from that I never went to that long long list. Nor did I ever deliberately create any address books. Wouldn't know how. And I have no idea how All Contacts got into my TB if it wasn't there all along. For now, I'm very grateful that by hook or crook your collective advice led me to be able to solve the problem and regret having irriateted you so much.