I want to use a Thunderbird address book folder to mail merge into MS Word letter [name, address]. How to?

Question

I recently migrated from Outlook 2010 to Thunderbird. I have contact folders. I publish a newsletter in MS Word. I want to mail merge my newsletter with now a specific contact database [folder] in the Thunderbird address book. So my question is, how to do this?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the tight and smooth integration you have experienced between Outlook and Word is due to those two products having come from the same Office stable and having been designed from the outset for such interoperability. With Thunderbird coming from a third party author, there's not much incentive for Microsoft to support or encourage interchange of data between Office components and Thunderbird.
If you have Outlook and Word, what advantages do you anticipate in using Thunderbird? (Personally, I do exactly the same because I dislike Outlook and its Ribbon in particular). But I don't have much call for the sort of task you are attempting.
The long and short of it is that you'll probably have to export your TB Address Book to a format that your Word mail merge can use. Since I haven't tried this for myself in a long time, I don't know what Word can use. I'd hope that CSV would fit the bill.
If you are thinking about moving away from Microsoft Office, then you might look at Libre Office, which can, IIRC, use a data source such as Thunderbird's address book as a mail merge source. But this alone may not be a very good reason to move away from tools you know. :-S