Just an observation/clarification: are you creating mailing lists or addressbooks? A mailing list contains only the name and email address. My inference from your post is that you are creating mailing lists, when you intend to create addressbooks.

Hi david,

Thanks for your reply. Let me clarify. I was under the mistaken impression that all information about contacts would be included in mailing lists. Now knowing that this is not the case, what I would like to do is nest some of the current addressbooks (whose contacts I rarely access) as "sub-addressbooks" (that include all contact information) within a single addressbook that contains the "sub-addressbooks" in the same way a file folder can contain subfolders. I'd like to do that in order to tidy up the list of addressbooks so that I'd only see the ones that contained the contacts I'm primarily interested in (plus, of course, the one addressbook that serves as a container for the less important addressbooks).

Clearly, being able to organize my addressbooks in this way isn't a big deal. I can live with what I have now. I just thought that if there were a not too complicated way to achieve this organization (perhaps by something like a drag and drop procedure), I'd like to learn how to do it.

Once again, thanks for any help you can provide.

Best regards, Larry

the compose window will search all addressbooks if you press F9 and the contact list appears. That's the best advice I can suggest.

Thanks for the suggestion, David. I guess Thunderbird doesn't have a feature that will allow me to organize my addressbooks in the way I described. I'm still a Thunderbird fan!

Well, it lets you search all addressbooks, or pick a specific one in which to start. Something different I haven't seen. Thunderbird forever!!!