"unable to load address book file?

[plonkplonk]

Does anyone know what this means? I just moved over to a new laptop but my address book seems fine.

It says the following:

"Unable to load address book file abook-1.mab. It may be read-only or locked by another application. Please try again later."

How do I fix this?

Thanks.

[DanRaisch]

By default Thunderbird uses two address book files. The Personal Address Book is represented on the hard drive as a file named abook.mab. Collected Addresses is represented on the hard drive as a file named history.mab.

The name listed in that error message, abook-1.mab indicates that on your previous machine you had created an additional address book file, possibly by importing contact data from another email program or external file.
How did you move the address book data from the old machine to the new laptop? If you copied the files with the extension .mab into a new installation of Thunderbird on the new laptop, the program would not automatically recognize an .mab file other than abook.mab and history.mab.

Do you have access to the old installation of Thunderbird? If so, you can check how many address books TB lists in the left hand pane of the Address Book window (Tools->Address Book or Ctrl+Shift+B). If only the two default books are listed (again, that's Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses) your new installation should be complete. If a third book is present, you could use this extension to import the data from that book into the new installation -- https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html

[plonkplonk]

Thanks, Dan. I'll give it a go and report back. I did copy the files as you suspected. I'll check the old installation.

Thanks again.