This tutorial will help you move address book from one Thunderbird instance to another. This can be accomplished by export and importing it as files. Finally, you might want to to this because you have multiple computers with Ubuntu then you want contacts from the older computer with a lot of addresses (your family, friends, colleagues, community, teams) to be available in the new one. Now let's try it out!

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What is address book?

Address book is where all your email contacts saved in Thunderbird Email Client. It is divided into two parts namely Personal and Collected and in turn can be saved or opened as files in the format known as Comma Separated Value or CSV.

How To Export Address Book

1. Run Thunderbird. 

2. Click Contacts logo to the left.

3. Select Personal Address Book -> click triple dots -> Export... -> save.

4. Select Collected Addresses -> click its triple dots -> Export... -> save.

Note: on older Thunderbird versions like in Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa", first open Address Book (located in the middle top) -> Tools -> Export -> Save twice -> done.

5. Done. Now you have two files named Personal Address Book.csv and Collected Addresses.csv.

How To Import Address Book

1. Run Thunderbird. 

2. Click Contacts to show all of your email contacts.

3. Click Import... -> select CSV option -> Continue -> select Personal Address Book.csv -> import.

4. Repeat (3) for Collected Address.csv as well.

Note: on older Thunderbird versions: first open Address Book -> Tools -> Import ->  select the CSV file -> repeat for another one.

5. Done. Your address book is imported.  

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About Thunderbird 

Mozilla Thunderbird is the official email client program on Ubuntu. On its own, it is a cross platform free/libre, open source email client software with multiple other features such as automatic spam filter, IRC and Matrix group chat, calendar and todo schedule management, reminder and many more. It is created by the same organization that created Firefox, Mozilla Foundation, developed publicly by a community of people around the world, and licensed under Mozilla Public License. Programmatically, Thunderbird is written in C, C++ and Rust languages. Lastly, Thunderbird invites everyone to get involved in its development by any means possible and you can help by donating money, writing code, translating UI language, reporting bug etc. Visit its official website at https://www.thunderbird.net.

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.