Are address books or contact lists embedded in systems such as MacOS, Windows?

[Dave2002]

I have to say that my understanding of address books for use in email is not good enough.

I assumed that the contacts lists would be in the mail client, but perhaps that's not the case.
In MacOS it seems almost impossible to create a contact list which is not snaffled up by the Apple Contacts app, and I'm beginning to wonder if the same is true for anything involving mail, even in other systems such as Windows. In other words, there is a "central" address book, which cannot be avoided.

Clearly the addresses are needed to send mail out, but what I'm really looking for is a way of creating a list which might only be used once and which does not need to be kept.

In the MacOS system it looks as though this can only be achieved by putting the email ids into the Contacts system, then setting them up as a Group. Surely it should be possible to set up a Group without having all the email ids then copied into the main list?

Also, it looks as though in El Capitan there were serious problems with Contacts.

I'm in the process of trying to send out mail to a considerable number of recipients - members of a society. The machine was running on Yosemite, and I migrated it to El Capitan. I now wonder if I should bump it up to Sierra or High Sierra, and if that will make a difference.

I may have found a way of sending out the mail using Thunderbird and using an Outlook mail account - but figuring this out is quite tedious - though maybe I'm almost there. I had thought that Thunderbird used its own address book system, but perhaps it doesn't.

I did look back at much earlier systems using mail in Unix, but it looks as though the world has moved on and it's now much more complicated than it was years ago. Otherwise I would, in desperation, simply have sent out single emails to each recipient based on a list from a shell script. I think that's still possible, but there are obstacles with the SMTP service to overcome depending on the ISP used.

Another possible issue, still to be overcome, is that some ISPs don't like large lists. Unfortunately I suspect that the number of addresses I want to send the mail to is right on the limits - about 150. A slight added complication with Thunderbird, seems to be that if one of the addresses "doesn't work", then none of the mail gets sent - or maybe it's just a syntax check problem. I'd settle for 140 of the messages being sent and arriving right now, as if 10 people don't get a message it's not the end of the world.

Overall, this area seems a right can of worms - or is it "just" a Mac/Apple problem? I suspect not, as my earlier experiences with Microsoft and PCs were almost equally horrendous. I actually fired up an old PC laptop/netbook yesterday - but it was absolutely dire and very slow. I think it will probably have to go to the dump. I cannot imagine why anyone ever thought they were any good - though I didn't but it was portable, and slightly useful for a year or two about a decade ago.

[cmr_for3]

Dave

My expertise lie in Windows (wide use of the term expertise there!) and not in MacOS or Linux. I thought the below may be helpful

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-manually-set-up-groups-in-the-windows-10-mail-app/

As I understand it, Windows does not keep a central address book unless you are signed in to your device with a particular MS email address. In which case I presume it will import those contacts.

Hope that is some help.

[Dave2002]

Dave

My expertise lie in Windows (wide use of the term expertise there!) and not in MacOS or Linux. I thought the below may be helpful

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-manually-set-up-groups-in-the-windows-10-mail-app/

As I understand it, Windows does not keep a central address book unless you are signed in to your device with a particular MS email address. In which case I presume it will import those contacts.

Thanks - that is interesting, and potentially helpful. Sounds as though MS hasn't even got this issue under control, and the suggestion in the article seems a bit like a kludge - a workaround. However, it may be that a similar trick would work with the Contacts in MacOS - I'm not sure.

There are actually several problems which can arise, including:

* one or more of the email providers may have problems with specific users
* gathering the contacts may not be so easy
* setting up the required contacts for a specific list or message may not work well
* the contacts for a specific list may never be required again - and should not really be retained at all
* trying to send a message to more than a few people - even if the lists are set up OK - may fall foul of
anti-spamming rules at the ISPs, and be difficult to workaround.

It is also not always easy to know if an email has been sent, depending on the system. Example - there is a list with 83 people. One server along the route rejects one of the emails. Does that mean that 82 people get the email, or none? Also if there are failures, is there a list of the failed recipients? Issues like this are a real pain.

If it is known that there are a few email ids which may be problematic, it is possible to use an email scanning service to find out if they are valid emails. One service I found would process 25 emails a day, otherwise would require payment.

I appreciate the efforts made to protect us all from spam, but the same efforts also protect us from ourselves, and prevent some potentially very useful actions from happening.

[cmr_for3]

Since you are using Thunderbird (I have used it briefly)

The below might also help

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_address_list_from_text_file

Do let me know how you get on. I can see this has been painful for you.

[Frances_iom]

Hi
I'm using 10+ yr old Lenovo machines - I maxed out the memory in some - they are generally more than fast enough to use (ok its mainly text creation, simple photo editing + database work - I use an equally old Compaq machine (the only nonLenovo that still works) for mail + the small amount of web browsing I do whilst listening radio etc - I have another Lenovo for more serious web work - I had one old XP machine which was like treacle but moving Linux onto it (admittedly the low overhead LXDE desktop system) made it very usable - so just setup a Linux system, maxout memory if possible and switch to thunderbird.
If you can't send 150 emails at same time just set up a bash script (or perl or whatever scripting language you are happy with) to work down a list of members, send out each the same mail - look for + note bounced emails then delay maybe 2 mins or so between sends if your ISP is fussy.
To be honest this could be done by a RaspberryPi as Raspbian in basically Debian10 and can be scripted etc

[Dave2002]

See http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...572#post794572 for one solution to the immediate problem. I might just do the thing of installing Linux on my older Netbook - though I'm not very convinced it'll be useful.

[AndrewAfresh]

Hi Dave

I only have experience of Windows not MacOS. I guess that, if you are using the Mac built-in mail software, it will be very much integrated with the built-in contact system and therefore using some other software to send the email would be preferable in my mind, or even sending from your mail provider's web page.

I use Thunderbird on Windows 7 and have it connected to gmail and yahoo accounts (I have a distant memory of trying to connect it to Outlook and it being difficult but I may not have tried hard enough).

To send mail to a list of people that I do not want to retain the addresses of, I would create an email in Thunderbird, click in "From" to select the account you want to send from, enter my email address in "To" and paste a list of comma-separated addresses to the "Bcc" box.

Any addresses that are rejected result in a separate rejection notification email which states the erroneous email address – though that is sending from a gmail account, other providers may act differently. I would not think that rejection by one mail server would cause the others to reject it too.

Is it possible to review your settings in whichever software you use, to see if there is an option to not automatically store in contacts the email addresses that you send to?

I expect you are less likely to be treated as a spammer if you send individual emails that use a personal salutation. I have done this using Access VBA code to send from a gmail account.

With your old PC laptop, would deleting unneeded software and running CCleaner on it help to speed it up?