Contacts spread over 29 *.mab address book files?

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thoste
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Joined: June 7th, 2003, 12:45 am

Contacts spread over 29 *.mab address book files?

Post by thoste »

I guess all my address book contacts are stored in *.mab files.

When I look into my profile folder then there are meanwhile 29 (!) *.mab files.

Is this correct and necessary ?

Can I tell TB to use only 1 *.mab file?

Logically I created 11 address books and assigned approx 300 contacts into these address books

Assume I want to transfer these contacts to another TB installation on another computer.
Would it be sufficient to just copy all these *.mab files from one folder to the other?

Thomas
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DanRaisch
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Re: Contacts spread over 29 *.mab address book files?

Post by DanRaisch »

Assume I want to transfer these contacts to another TB installation on another computer.
Would it be sufficient to just copy all these *.mab files from one folder to the other?
No, that would not work.

A default installation of Thunderbird includes only two address books and therefore two .mab files. Those files would be named abook.mab and history.mab and the corresponding address books would be named "Personal Address Book" and "Collected Addresses" respectively. Thunderbird does not spontaneously create address books on its own. Importing data from an external source would create one addition address book (.mab file) per imported file, and the user addition of address books (File->New->Address Book) would do the same thing.

Simply copying .mab files other than abook.mab and history.mab from one profile to another would not work as Thunderbird would not recognize those files as address book files. The extension MoreFunctionsForAddressBook would add functionality for importing directly from those .mab files to Thunderbird. Alternatively, exporting the contact data from the non-default address books to CSV format files would provide a means for Thunderbird to import the data, adding an address book with the same name as that of the CSV file imported.
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tanstaafl
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Re: Contacts spread over 29 *.mab address book files?

Post by tanstaafl »

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_addres ... n_profiles

The MoreFunctionsForAddressBook add-on also lets you specify for each account what address books it uses for auto-complete. So you could use just the personal address book and ignore the existence of the collected addresses address book. You'd only notice it when you open the address book window to edit or add something.
thoste
Posts: 317
Joined: June 7th, 2003, 12:45 am

Re: Contacts spread over 29 *.mab address book files?

Post by thoste »

Can I somehow merge physically all *.mab address book files into one (while preserving logically multiple address books in GUI)?
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