Today I finally sent out the link to Mondhandy.de to my friends. To do so, I first went through the unpleasant process of creating a list in the Thunderbird address book, so that I could send the email to several people at once. It’s unpleasant, because Thunderbird implements the list dialog as a modal dialog, which means that you can not browse your address book for addresses to include in the list while browsing the list. I helped myself by typing each letter in the alphabet and then cycling through the completions list Thunderbird offers, but it is an error prone process. I guess Thunderbird is not the tool of choice for people who have to handle a lot of lists. The address book really only offers the most basic functionality that is imaginable.

Having created the list, I wrote my tentative introduction email. I entered the list name in the “To” field of the application and pressed send. All was well – NOT!!! I had included myself in the list, to be able to check the end result, and there it was: all email addresses from the list where included in the email. Very embarrassing! Although everybody does it, I don’t think it is very good style to mail other people’s email addresses around like that. I would have expected Thunderbird to not do it and instead send the mail to everybody on the list individually. But of course there might be legitimate reasons to include everybody, too, so I can’t really blame Thunderbird.

I haven’t found a good solution for this, either. I created a small test list consisting only of my own email addresses (two of them, anyway), and tried sending a mail to the list in BCC mode (Blind Carbon Copy). While the emails arrived indivdually as desired, now the recipient was “undisclosed recipients”, with the real address buried somewhere in the email headers as X-Delivered-To. I don’t like that very much – I’d like to have all emails delivered to me having my email address in the To: field. That’s because I filter spam based on the To: field, and if emails arrive with random other headers containing my email address, I can’t filter properly.

Now I guess that is a shortcoming of the email specification (there seem to be hundreds of possible header fields that can be used for the recipient), or simply my lacking knowledge (perhaps there is a header field that is ALWAYS included, so that I could use that for filtering instead of To:). Still, I think Thunderbird should have sent out the mails in a nicer way, and if the second thing was the case, Thunderbird should offer me that header field as a choice in the mail filters dialog.