Archive for September, 2008

Bulk-Adding “To” and “BCC” Recipients to a Thunderbird Email

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I found a new use for our Web Tools by Perceptus website.  I was sending a bulk email to friends, family, clients, and co-workers about my team’s upcoming race in the Red Bull Soapbox Derby in Vancouver.

But the list of email addresses I selected in Outlook, my PIM, would not copy and paste into a new email in Thunderbird, my email client.*  Outlook separates recipients with semi-colons, Thunderbird… doesn’t.  It’s not immediately obvious to me what Thunderbird will accept as a separator in a single “to” line. It took several Google searches (or was it trial and error?) to figure out that Thunderbird will accept line breaks, i.e. “enter”.

Now all I needed to do was find quick way to convert the list which looks like this “<Leonard> me@perceptus.ca; <Me too> me2@perceptus.ca” from Outlook.  In this case, the extra name information that comes up in angled braces was just in the way.

Fortunately, The Email Grep Text Wizard! from our tools site, tools.perceptus.ca, handled the job well.  Just paste the list from Outlook and let our website return a clean simple list of email addresses.  One email per line.

* My PDA syncs to Outlook so it has to be the personal info manager, but I prefer the email features of Thunderbird.  Yes, it’s cumbersome, and no, I’m not entirely happy with the setup, but I haven’t found anything better, yet.