Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Mulongo oyo etiyamaki na archive. Tuna motuna mosusu soki osengeli na lisalisi

Calendar doesn't show all available emails for potential attendees.

more options

I'm using Thunderbird 62.0.2 on Windows 10 64-bit with the Lightning calendar. I'm using gContactSync to synchronize my Google contacts. I have a contact with one personal "Email", one work "Additional Email", and another work "Third Email", all shown in the Thunderbird Address Book. Yet when I try to add an invitation and invite that person, only their personal and one work email shows up. The other work email, shown as "Third Email" in the Address Book summary, doesn't appear as a selection.

When I open the contact in the Address Book to edit it, I see that the "Contact" tab only has "Email" and "Additional Email" fields. The "gContactSync" tab is what actually has the "Additional Email Addresses" fields, and where the third email address (which I need to invite) appears.

So Thunderbird only supports two email addresses for each contact?? How can I pick up this third email address that gContactSync has brought in. Isn't a hard limit of two email addresses sort of old-fashioned? Why can't we add as many as we need? How can I work around this?

Thanks in advance.

I'm using Thunderbird 62.0.2 on Windows 10 64-bit with the Lightning calendar. I'm using gContactSync to synchronize my Google contacts. I have a contact with one personal "Email", one work "Additional Email", and another work "Third Email", all shown in the Thunderbird Address Book. Yet when I try to add an invitation and invite that person, only their personal and one work email shows up. The other work email, shown as "Third Email" in the Address Book summary, doesn't appear as a selection. When I open the contact in the Address Book to edit it, I see that the "Contact" tab only has "Email" and "Additional Email" fields. The "gContactSync" tab is what actually has the "Additional Email Addresses" fields, and where the third email address (which I need to invite) appears. So Thunderbird only supports two email addresses for each contact?? How can I pick up this third email address that gContactSync has brought in. Isn't a hard limit of two email addresses sort of old-fashioned? Why can't we add as many as we need? How can I work around this? Thanks in advance.

All Replies (3)

more options

Oh, this is really odd. Did you know that if you have the address book open when you try to save a new calendar event, it will save the event but leave the new event dialog open, so that if you keep hitting "Save and Close" thinking it's not working, it will keep adding duplicate events without your realizing it? That looks like a bug—separate from this multiple email thing.

more options

garretwilson said

So Thunderbird only supports two email addresses for each contact?? How can I pick up this third email address that gContactSync has brought in. Isn't a hard limit of two email addresses sort of old-fashioned? Why can't we add as many as we need? How can I work around this?

I would suggest adding the contact a second time with (Work) in they name. Most folk tend to keep work and personal information separate.

In answer to your comments. Yes, it is archaic having a hard limit, No, it is not good. Yes, there is an intention to re write the address book component from the ground up.

When Mozilla ceased development of Thunderbird in 2012 they had just begun a rewrite process. With the withdrawl of the Mozilla developers all feature updates stopped for a time while the community got organized around keeping Thunderbird alive. The first couple of years were very shoe string with Mozilla insisting Thunderbird find a new home. As you can see Thunderbird still has a Mozilla brand, so a new home was not needed in the end, but years of development disruption occurred while these issues were sorted.

With donations from the Thunderbird users a more stable situation arose, just about the time Mozilla started ripping things Thunderbird relied upon out of the development tree. So a long period of just moving the shells around occurred while the developers worked tirelessly to keep Thunderbird in a state where it would build and a new version could be released. Feature updates occurred, but they were minor.

Thunderbird 60 is the first release in a number of years with significant changes, hence the automatic disabling of add-on that have not been updated for version 60. Old versions will just not work.

Now work is finally going on in the composer and address book. with something like the cardbook add-on envisaged for the future. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/

I have not tested it's multiple address against Lightning, but it does have a preferred address for writing mails which may well transfer to lightning.

more options

> I would suggest adding the contact a second time with (Work) in they name.

Nooooo!!!!! :O I'm not going back to the Nokia not-smartphone days where I stored my contacts on the SIM card and made a different entry for (Home), (Work), (Fax), (Other Work), etc. (shudder)

The (already ancient) vCard RFC already has the facility to label each telephone number as home/work/whatever. No need for such a … workaround.

But thanks for the response. Essentially it sounds like a known limitation that has no hope of being resolved any time soon.