how to delete *all* contacts from Address Book?

[BlipBertMon]

Despite my best attempts to prevent contact fusion, TBird in consort with something else, Google Contacts perhaps, has been 'syncing' address and contact information with resplendent resulting chaos. I've ignored it for a long time, but of late, TBird (45.1.1) goes into a tailspin and hangs with 100% CPU consumption. Looking with top and iosnoop, I see AddressBookS__ consuming vast quantities of CPU doing something with sqlite files. Bringing up AddressBook I find TBird thinks I have 86,283 contacts, most all of which are blank, and the blank ones can't be deleted with the AddressBook UI. Exporting them as CVS, I find contacts interspersed amidst hundreds of lines of only commas. So I did the obvious thing, export everything |sort|uniq > newfile.csv, and edit out all the *.p

Now, how to delete *all contacts* from TBird/AddressBook?? somewhere in ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles... perhaps???
so I can reload from scratch the sanitized csv file???

[DanRaisch]

Moving to Thunderbird Support.

By default, Thunderbird does not synch contacts with Gmail or any other email provider. Did you install an extension to synch with Google contacts?

Click on the the name of the address book involved (I'm assuming it's called Personal Address Book) in the left hand pane of the address book window. Now click on any name in the right hand list pane. Press Cmd-A or use menu path Edit->Select All to highlight all entries then pres the Del key.
Alternatively, close Thunderbird and navigate to the profile folder and locate and delete the file abook.mab (if the address book involved is the Personal Address Book.)

[BlipBertMon]

Add-Ons none.
Extensions none.
The only non-disabled plug-in of about two dozen, is Shockwave Flash.

looks like all the blank entries were in an address book 'Mac OSX Address Book',
which I apparently injected from an .ldif file some time ago.
I don't have notes exactly what I did.., though I note a possibly related post:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=1534575

Deleting the 'Mac OSX Address Book' address book containing all the blank entries cleared them from TBird/AB;

Sure enough the OSX(SL) Address book ... 83,664 entries.. most all of them blank,
and the UI, like the TBird/AB UI, fails to enable deletion.
Selecting even a tiny fraction (one) of them sends OSX(SL)' AddressBook out to lunch, chewing up a whole CPU.
Detect/Merge duplicated data.. has memory-leak space complexity.
.. up to 12GB of VM footprint so far with practically nothing on the progress bar.
LDIF apparently can't handle zillions of identically-keyed 'blank' records.

[wsmwk]

Some services like google contacts sync are known to cause duplicates.

your choices for remediation are to delete the actual address book and start over, or use something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunde ... t-manager/