Can Thunderbird read the addresses from all received mail into the Address book?

Question

I formatted the HDD on my work PC this weekend, and I only made a backup of the non-hidden folders in my home folder. I didn't think I'd lost anything important, but... I only noticed when I tried to send an e-mail that Thunderbird hasn't been saving e-mail addresses in a contact database on the server, so all the addresses I'd collected are gone.

Is there a way to make the new Thunderbird 3.1 installation go through all the mails in my account and put the addresses of all senders into its contacts database? Or is there another application which can connect to my account and do that, then export the result to Thunderbird?

Answer 1

Not totally what you asked for but it's a start:

A Thunderbird add-on called EMail Address Crawler

You can select any of your e-mail folders, and specify any of your address books as a target. "EMail Address Crawler" will then search that folder and its sub folders for e-mail addresses and will add them to your address book.