Hover your mouse pointer over the bottom of the subject field and when it changes to a double headed arrow, click and drag down until you see as many address fields as you like.

FYI: Thunderbird has always worked like this.

Thanks a bunch for the help. It is news to me that this methodology was the way the old version worked. But who cares: now I know.

Thanks again.

Bob Price

On another note: Using the new version 31.0, how do you keep the address field from scrolling up and no longer be able to see the entry. When entering an email address, you use to be able to hit tab or enter and it would take you to the subject field but still allow you to see the email address that you entered in the To: field. Now it immediately scrolls up and shows an additional To: field.

Any help is appreciated.

Bob Rice aka bigears78 (reporter) and anyone else affected, sorry for the inconvenience caused by changes in the recipient area of latest release TB31; and some of the replies here aren't accurate.

1) Before TB24, default number of rows for recipient are was 4. In TB24, we changed this with my patch in Bug 425451 to become 3, assuming this will save precious vertical space for a large number of private users, given that the entire header area consumes a lot of screen real estate. For users who regularly use and want to see more than 3 recipients at a time as a default, there's a hidden pref:

Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Config Editor mail.compose.addresswidget.numRowsShownDefault=3;

2) Since time immemorial, you can drag to manually expand the composition header area for that specific message (not preserved because your next message will be different; use default rows pref above). Before TB31, drag the splitter underneath Subject field. From TB31 onwards, drag the bottom border of the composition header area, i.e. the bottom border of the formatting toolbar in case of HTML messages.

3) There's a bug in TB31 (at least on Windows XP theme which I'm using) that the vertical space of the widget was calculated too small; hence there's a scrollbar as soon as you start a new message which shouldn't be there. As you add more addresses, these few missing pixels will cause the 3rd row to never be visible UNLESS you expand the widget manually as described in 2) above, or increase the default number of rows, see 1). So you end up with a maximum of 2 visible rows at any time, which will mostly be appear to be just 1 row because the blank row also counts (for more details, see 4). I think we can morph Bug 1056404 to cover this issue.

OT: I had notified responsible volunteer devs about this problem via PM in April, timely before release cycle, but did not get reply because they weren't happy with my other suggestions how to make the strange new flat header a bit less strange by at least making the header type selectors (To, CC, ...) blend in rather than stand out for no reason.

4) In TB24, Enter in last recipient row confirmed that recipient and added a new blank row; Tab would just move focus to the subject field. In TB31, Tab now behaves like Enter, also creates a new row. There are pros and cons for that behaviour, but we've heard from several users that they are not happy with this, so we're in the process of reverting that change back to the old behaviour in Bug 1043784 .

So much for expert news. Hope this helps.