I’ve spent a bunch of time in the last few weeks trying to create a unified contact list encompassing Thunderbird, Gmail and my Android phone. I had a minor irritation in Thunderbird when clicking ‘Add to Address Book’ (or starring a contact in the message view) would create the new contact in the ‘Collected Addresses’ address book, instead of where I wanted (the ‘Personal Address Book’).
Turns out where new contacts are added is dependent on an options setting – Options, Composition tab, Addressing sub-tab – you’ll see the below:
Change the ‘automatically add outgoing e-mail addresses to my…’ field to be whichever address book you want new contacts to be saved in. Note that this takes preference regardless of whether or not the checkbox for that option is selected.